Stalking and Harassment, GM/Square Enix Refusal to act

I highly doubt most people are honest about being stalked/harassed. It really sounds like a major over exaggeration. What ever happened to strong independent women that needs to man (square enix team) to fix it for you?

people should stop using ff14 as dating sim, then all this wouldnt happen anymore

I hate to say it, but this is also one reason why SE caved in and raised the rating to R17. One of the recent complaints I saw was from someone stalking/harassing a character that was being played by a known minor (a 15 year old) and no amount of complaints, blocking from the FC house, etc was able to stop the stalker. The stalker also shit talked about the FC leader and the player character of the teenager, which is just gross and obsessive behavior regardless.

Anyway, it used to be that SE was okay with a teen playing the game with parental supervision, but shit like this keeps happening because of creeps who won't respect boundaries.

Sadly GM moderation in this game only amounts to “Don’t say bad stuff boohoo” for the most part. They can’t even deal with PvP ‘drama’ involving cheats without having to rely on offender saying anything offensive or self incriminating in-game lol. It’s no surprise they’re also similarly bad on stalking/harassment issues.

Bard music not being filtered, bypassing with auto-translate/other language, and 10d restriction limit on estates are just bad though. Didn’t know those were even a thing. I think they should look into this further at the very least if they can’t help with your issue specifically.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

I hate to say it, but this is also one reason why SE caved in and raised the rating to R17. One of the recent complaints I saw was from someone stalking/harassing a character that was being played by a known minor (a 15 year old) and no amount of complaints, blocking from the FC house, etc was able to stop the stalker. The stalker also shit talked about the FC leader and the player character of the teenager, which is just gross and obsessive behavior regardless.

Anyway, it used to be that SE was okay with a teen playing the game with parental supervision, but shit like this keeps happening because of creeps who won't respect boundaries.

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It's still T for teen in the USA, and online interactions are not rated forever for all kinds of online games since it's impossible unless they're breaking the ToS noticeably.

Honestly, I don't think SE is OK with teens playing w/o parental supervision since they can meet terrible ppl online in most online games but as a company they can't control how parents will or will not watch over their kids in games with others speaking as someone who grew up with the stranger danger warnings about the internet too.

For stalking, if it's that serious, I would try to contact the local police about cyberstalking, which is a crime too in some cities since I don't think SE can just stop someone from making infinite FT accounts to stalk others like they can't even stop the Weaboo Police from harassing ppl for ages in their world/DCs apart from muting them.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Bard music not being filtered

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I was able to test this specifically (my FC lead is very busy so I haven't been able to test the FC rightsholder bit for bug reporting purposes), and no, bard music doesn't play through a blacklist. It vanishes the player and their sounds completely. (Sorry random bard in Limsa I just blacklisted and then whitelisted for testing purposes!)

Blacklists wouldn't do much if a stalker keeps making new accounts...about the only way to mitigate THAT is to have an FC house in Ishgard. Brand new players can't get there easily at all.

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Originally Posted by JerryBerrry

I highly doubt most people are honest about being stalked/harassed. It really sounds like a major over exaggeration. What ever happened to strong independent women that needs to man (square enix team) to fix it for you?

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Like your whin- complaint about premades on the PvP section of these boards right now? Sorry but that was just begging for a snark-back.

Nah man. My incident occurred because at the time I didn't know you could opt out of follows and shit on the lodestone (iirc that was somewhat new when I came back?) I'm thinking my "stalkers" saw activity via that and went to intercept.

I was livid since it was literally within 2-3 days of me coming back to the game and on a different server and I wasn't having any of that malarkey following me around while trying to acclimatize to the game again after a year+ of being away. So yeah, I summoned GM intervention as it was within my right to do so. It apparently worked, along with blacklisting and ignoring any advances thereafter that.

I just don't assume that result was purely down to the preventative measures I undertook, I do believe the GMs might've done something to help that process along (or would like to). Either way I can't complain. I've had overall pretty okay results whenever I've had a GM get back to me. It's just with the PvP side of things I really can't verify if it was just empty cordiality that took place versus actual action.

And I mean my anecdotal episode there kinda goes a little towards proving not all the weird ass behaviour stems from some romantic misadventure lol, as some here are lead to believe. Some may be karma farming but some of them are also unfortunately real. The kind that follows you across servers or even DCs. Personally not seen this before until this MMO, not over PvE that's for sure.

Myself and many others detailed exactly where the current software-side and GM-side remedies were lacking, and somehow that's "looking for attention" and e-dating related, apparently. Blacklisting someone who keeps following you into field operations and telling people not to party with you doesn't solve the problem, because now you just don't see them doing it. If there's 50 people in the instance, they all see the spam and now our names are associated with the bad actor. It shouldn't be on us to server hop, that's a burden on us for them breaking the rules. It took that person being banned from non-squenix Discord servers for them to lay off, while we just got boilerplate communication from GMs and don't even know if they faced in-game disciplinary action. (And ftr, this was not a "social side" or "dating" thing. A fight broke out after we tried running high-end content together and the perpetrator decided that screaming insults at people, spamming DMs/pings, and chasing us around to warn others that we suck at the game for a *week* was an appropriate response) People seem to be missing the fact that a player who is spamming emotes/instruments/shouts is obstructive to everyone, even if only one person is the target, and bystanders will associate both perpetrator and victim as annoyances. I'd imagine all the people putting time and effort into buying an FC house, decorating it, hosting events etc. wouldn't be too happy about becoming "that one plot with the yelling bongo player we have to keep blacklisting"

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Originally Posted by Astronis

I was able to test this specifically (my FC lead is very busy so I haven't been able to test the FC rightsholder bit for bug reporting purposes), and no, bard music doesn't play through a blacklist. It vanishes the player and their sounds completely. (Sorry random bard in Limsa I just blacklisted and then whitelisted for testing purposes!)[...]

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That's a relief. They still should do better on FC estate limitation though.

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[...]Blacklists wouldn't do much if a stalker keeps making new accounts...about the only way to mitigate THAT is to have an FC house in Ishgard. Brand new players can't get there easily at all.

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This made me chuckle, though more because I forgot Empyreum stays inaccessible till completion of 3.3. Still, I think Free Trial accounts should not have access to housing zones at all. Or limit their excursion i.e. only for 30 minutes a day then get auto boot until next refresh.

No amount of GMs or rules can make up for the fact that most millennials are terrible parents who are too busy watching and posting tiktoks to monitor their children.
You don't have to edate someone for them to stalk you, some people are so mentally deranged that they can easily fall in love your XIV character alone without you even saying anything.
Not as a hroth though, they're unattractive enough to be safe.
If someones stalking you into your house, lock your house. "I dont want to" ok then ban them from entering your house. But really, just lock it-I dont get people who refuse to. It takes 000.2 seconds.