Summary
- Final Fantasy 14’s recent blacklisting changes seem to have unintentionally made stalking people in-game a lot easier.
- Thanks to players recently getting a unique account ID, which has been made readily available on Final Fantasy 14’s client, mods such as PlayerScope are able to reveal the details of people’s accounts.
- Other people that use PlayerScope can therefore easily find a player’s location, name, and the name of every single alt account a person has made.
Final Fantasy 14 has had a big problem with stalking and harassment for a long while, but last year’s blacklisting changes were very much welcomed by the community with open arms. Not only does blacklisting hide a person’s chat messages, names, and character models, but it applies to a person’s service account, meaning any alts they use are also blacklisted.
Fast-forward to now, and it seems like those very same blacklisting changes could have made stalking a lot easier. First reported by PC Gamer, a plugin called PlayerScope is the subject of the Final Fantasy 14 community’s ire, which essentially allows people to search for a Final Fantasy 14 character’s name, which then brings up their account details.
Final Fantasy 14 Fans In Uproar As Blacklist Changes Make Stalking Easier
This has been made possible thanks to the blacklist change brought in by Dawntrail, as PlayerScope uses a newly introduced unique account ID system to collect a player’s info and stick it on a server. Anyone else with PlayerScope can then use this server to look up details such as your location, location history, name, and every single alt character you’ve ever made across you entire account. If you want a more detailed breakdown of the Dawntrail blacklist changes, popular plugin loader Dalamud recently issued a statement addressing PlayerScope and how it’s able to function.
What makes the situation even worse is that you actually have to opt out of the plugin if you don’t want people searching for your details, as the mod author behind PlayerScope is asking that people join the Discord to make their profiles private. To do that, you have to hand over your Discord ID, the names of all your characters, and what servers they’re on to a complete stranger, which is ridiculous to ask of someone that wants to keep their details private.
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PlayerScope isn’t the only plugin that can do this either. If PlayerScope and its Discord server were to vanish tomorrow, another person could easily get the info they wanted if they were committed enough, thanks to the game’s client now making the data readily available. It’s a gigantic blunder from Square Enix, which knows fully well that people use mods and plugins, despite them being against ToS, and should have taken that into account before exposing everyone’s unique account IDs.
While the people that make plugins like PlayerScope may claim innocence, the only reason these kinds of plugins exist is to invade someone’s privacy. PlayerScope doesn’t appear to have any kind of innocent intended purpose, and stalking has been a problem in Final Fantasy 14 for a while. Hopefully, fans can kick up a big enough stink for Square Enix to actually do something about the issue, and soon.
