Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail introduced a number of new blacklisting features intended to address complaints that the MMO did not offer enough tools to help people escape bullying and harassment from other players. Unfortunately, it appears that the implementation of these changes has introduced a backend exploit that could make it easier than ever to harass bad actors, and mods are starting to emerge that take advantage of it.
With the introduction of new blacklisting features in Dawntrail, blacklisting an individual character would now block all characters linked to that player's account. As PC Gamer notes, players soon discovered that, along with this feature, each player now had a unique “account ID” that would be transmitted to the game client whenever they entered the same area as one of that player's characters. .
With the right mod, someone could, in theory, start matching characters to account IDs and create a database that makes public the entire list of alters for any individual. It doesn't take much imagination to see how such a feature could be used for harassment. While your best defense against a genuine stalker in FF14 might have been to create a new character, if someone could track your alters you'd have to create a whole new account, something Square Enix's notoriously labyrinthine account system wouldn't make easy. not to mention the setbacks in progress.
This week, the community discovered that such a mod was already in development. Called PlayerScope, it promises to track virtually all character information tied to a given account, from alts to retention wizards, and future updates promise to add Free Company and PvP team information as well. The mod has not yet been made available to the public, but its developer is currently whitelisting players for use of the add-on.
To say the overall community response has been negative would be an understatement. The consensus is that the sole purpose of such a tool would be to harass other players, and no one is happy with the developer's suggestion that you should join the PlayerScope Discord if you want to opt out of being tracked.
Discord for PlayerScope is currently quite small, but the community has some hope that making noise about it early will get Square Enix's attention to shut the whole thing down or, ideally, fix the account ID issue that makes it possible in the future. first place.
Final Fantasy 14 is one of the best MMORPG around, but you can't host a massive online community without some of its members trying to ruin things for everyone.