Final Fantasy 14's community has been frayed at the edges recently, as widespread awareness of a modding tool that allows stalkers—an issue FF14 has had for a while—to have access to every alternate character on their target's account.
Dawntrail received a more powerful blacklisting system to help fight stalking behaviour, but the mod actually takes advantage of those changes. As revealed earlier in the month, the new blacklisting system swaps out a character ID (invisibly sent to clients) for an account-wide ID which—from what I've seen—isn't even particularly hard for a person to snag, because it's all client-side.
The mods in question can then simply check for other characters with the same ID from a database for convenience's sake, but the privacy problem starts and ends with the way the game's built.
Game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) responded to the community's concerns via the Lodestone forums yesterday. The post explains that: "The Development and Operations teams are aware of the situation and the concerns being raised by the community and are discussing the following options."
Those options, however, only include "requesting that the tool in question be removed and deleted" and "pursuing legal action". The post also asks "everyone to refrain from using third-party tools. We also ask that players do not share information about third-party tools such as details about their installation methods, or take any other actions to assist in their dissemination."
I'm not convinced that these measures are remotely good enough. Why? Well, the method for nabbing this ID is already in the ecosystem. Square Enix could absolutely pursue legal action against one mod author, but there's nothing to stop another popping up somewhere else—you can't control your playerbase, but you can control what the game sends to other clients.
And sure, FF14 is in a bit of a bind when it comes to mods. For context: While mods are technically against the game's terms of service, and are a bannable offense, Square Enix does not proactively try to detect them—instead, if you're reported for using one (or are just cheating), the hammer will come down.
They also aren't typically used for nefarious purposes like this—from my observations, players mainly use mods for quality of life adjustments, housebuilding, fixes to the game's wonky netcode, building outfits, accessibility options, taking screenshots and making custom poses, animations, and other silly nonsense.
There are also cosmetic mods that alter your character, which can range from innocuous expression such as adding scars, half-elf ears, and different body types—to smutty Second-Life style monstrosities (or 'modbeasts', as the community dubs them) but nothing actively deleterious to the game's health, or worse than a Google search can provide. As long as nobody puts up a billboard about it.
As such, this unofficial 'don't be an idiot' agreement has stood decently so far, bar a few cheating scandals in world first races. Any effort to see mods forcibly removed via an anti-cheat or similar would be disastrous for the playerbase—and likely see a hefty exodus of players. Whether the extent of that would be ruinous isn't clear, but I don't think that's a gamble Square's willing to take. Yoshida can politely ask people to stop using them all he wants, but they've been a part of the game's ecosystem forever.
The rub? If they can't reasonably stop mods—and I'm not sure I'd want them to—then it's really on the Final Fantasy 14 devs to find a way to implement these blacklisting changes (which, to be clear, were solid in concept and a long time coming) without sending clients data that scuppers the whole effort. And you can't just ask people to play nice, either, because somebody won't—and the moment they don't, you've already got a problem.
