"""congestion""" lmao
My beef with this guy is when he starts making ableist, discriminatory remarks about people with autism, because I've seen him do that before and reported it. Otherwise his presence would be meh, but I find it frustrating if he continues to perpetrate hateful speech.
I never said it impacted me personally. But the current "congestion" situation does impact me personally, and their presence in mass numbers like this very much does affect that situation. Whether or not you or anyone else "actually on Leviathan" have seen any complaints about it is irrelevant, especially since they aren't restricted to just Leviathan.
Yes, it's not like I'm unable to get onto Faerie most afternoons/evenings because of it, right? My personal experiences are totally not real.
Yet it was enough worth the time that you felt the need to respond indirectly.
Says the person complaining about other people complaining.
If you'd like to actually discuss or debate the topic that's cool, but if you're just gonna talk shit about me to other people like this then you can kindly fuck off.
https://i.imgur.com/6LUzXbg.gif
At this point, this is not "some guy existing".
But essentially, it is negatively affecting new player experience. The people who never have to engage with it, whatever. You don't go to Limsa or hear about it. But literally every day or sometimes every few hours they have to see it or engage with it. It's a public nuisance and it seems they can be removed/banned off the basis of him using bots to level these, so that is what has to be reported to the Special Task Force.
That's interesting, I thought that was just the queue to get into a world. The way the "congestion" stuff was presented pointed at it being based off the number of non-native players currently sitting in a world/DC at any given time. Hence why Aether is always blocked off because so many non-Aether players are there at almost all times.
So where is the line for what is a public nuisance? They aren't blocking access to anything, its just a minor eyesore for people passing through the Aetheryte plaza. If every minor eyesore or trivial inconvenience can be considered a public nuisance, this isn't an MMO - it's a theme park curated by and for HOA Karens.
If you're going to accuse them of botting to level them I hope you've got evidence.
I have no beef with you personally. Just the idea/argument that idling characters have any material impact on congestion, causing a negative impact on player experiences. The "congestion" "feature" was added after Endwalker's launch because the decades old infrastructure melts into cascading failures when too many people try to log on at once. The "congestion queues" are largely fake anyway - what's really happening is they process logins in pulses so it's less of a position in a queue and more of an arbitrary timer.
Well the way the congestion stuff has always been presented is for it to be influenced by the amount of non-native players in any particular world/DC, more or less that there's a cap on the number of visitors allowed at any given time. Hence why Aether tends to be completely inaccessible to outsiders during peak hours like afternoons/evenings. 20-60 alts from outside would most certainly be affecting it then in that case. But Daralii mentioned that not being the case, and if so then I agree, nothing really should be done about these guys no matter how annoying they are or aren't to anyone.
I wouldn't waste your time talking to that Anone person anymore. I'm pretty sure they are also a botter type from things I saw in Diadem/Firmament.
But the congestion thing is affected by simultaneous log ins, yeah. So if Leviathan were to get the "restricted" type of Congested status which all of Aether has, it would affect things. However, free trial accounts are not priority so they would get either disconnected or not have priority if someone who has a paid sub is trying to log in. I don't think they've ever had this sort of issue before with someone trying to 'take up space' in this manner before.
I just didn't take kindly to the indirect comments about me, they felt very personal attack-ish and were very assumptive. I don't complain for the sake of it, if I didn't genuinely enjoy this game for the most part I'd just unsub and be done with it rather than sticking around being unhappy.
As for these weeb police eyesores(ironic word choice coming from someone who usually LOVES seeing lots of broes in one place) they were cluttering up Malboro before DT so I personally experienced them on my own world. But at that time, it was simply that: an annoyance, one that other people apparently were entertained by so it was fine. My issue stemmed from the congestion shit added in DT, which yes it is largely artificial but still an actual thing, and the way it's always been presented leaned toward these guys exacerbating the issue. If that truly isn't the case, then yes, nothing should be done with them unless they are breaking any rules(I dunno if they are)
I'm convinced the congestion issue stems by the player cap being a percentage based system instead of a flat number. So if a certain worlds reaches 10% player base (just an example), then it becomes congested.
This is entirely a theory with 0 evidence to back it up other that it makes no sense for us to have as much if not more congested worlds than SHB when the population has decreased a good amount.
But I'm on board with those saying that this isn't actually harmful. The argument that it can sour a new players experience is entirely subjective and can just as easily make a new players day.
Im sorry but "doesnt do harm" does not equal "we gotta accept it"... And everyone coming with "prove he bots!" ill only say... ok, prove how you make 50 accounts per hour and log em all at once.
Could be % based, could be active player accounts on the server within a given month, could be a manual toggle that they just won't turn off despite it no longer being the case, who knows.
The login queue however is entirely artificial, because the login server works in batches.
This doesn't mean the server is actually full when you get a queue at 4am, but that X amount of other players are currently trying to log in and the server waits an arbitrary amount of time until it processes them all. Probably requires less resources than processing every login request individually.
I blacklisted them because they cause unnecessary drain on my computer that slows to a crawl when there are too many people in a given area. S rank hunts are one thing because it's all genuine players there to kill it but this is completely unnecessary and a waste of resources that directly impacts the performance of my computer. Soon I won't have space to blacklist them all because of the small 200 limit when there are 157 of them already blocked and I won't have space to block people that harass and stalk me. Not to mention they are an eye sore too.
I don't mind them, it's kinda funny. That said - they often block people or objects i want to interact with so i blacklist them.
I would like a bigger blacklist though, and maybe devs could proactively action nuisance accounts that have high blacklist participation.
He's not even obstructing the zone with how spread out they are. There are no msq quests where he's standing. He's just vibing and having a laugh. I know someone on guild wars who does that because he likes getting whispers from people and getting in conversations. The fact that this post even exists blows my mind. The games not serious enough to dictate what you want to control. You don't own the game.
i mean, literally, the second half of your post is an exaggeration that's not even realistically what's happening so you asking someone to prove something that doesn't exist is redundant. you don't even know how long the account creation process took him, you don't know that they all logged in at the same time, you have no idea what the pc screens look like as they could just be launching/sitting at character select for hours as a process until he does 2 clicks per screen which is like, 2s * 20 accounts = 40s of them coming in despite the fact each launcher/client hadn't been open for the same time period.
the botting reasoning is also a bad argument in general because noone gets banned for botting in general unless they're doing it for 24+ hours straight consistently for an automatic passive flag the task force set up gets hit because like I said, square enix can't see what's going on on a PC. Yoshi P literally used the example of someone using a calculator and doing a raiding rotation at the same time as one reason they don't like drawing a line and even trying to define what 3rd party software is or what its purpose is or to in their words "get into a reporting war over who is and isn't using 3rd party software, why did I get banned and they didn't, because that's not what the mmo experience should be about". they don't want to deal with technicalities, they don't want to deal with what is and isn't realistic. you could look at bards, housing, ppl in impossible sitting poses in open world and see blatant 3rd party software usage that's common sense not even remotely possible by a human being or a possibility due to a code restriction, but you want them to enforce 3rd party software over, what, doing msq and afk'ing? you realize a gm has to go to each of those accounts, and backtrack and find the logs of leveling and combat and cross reference tens if not hundreds of accounts to even remotely prove that argument because on a theoreitical level, you could have a macro for combat while physically moving several characters on a different screen, so he needs significant overlap in the matter of looking at a combat log /BY THE SECONDS/ to even try to prove that. Square Enix already defined their burden of proof/when they care about 3rd party software so unless you have a livestream of them running into a wall for 3 hours or behaving like Eureka bots, you're not going to be able to do anything, because even if you had a video sent by someone else, videos and screenshots aren't considered proof by GM's and they'll tell you that if you try to attach/mention one in a ticket. You'd have to livestream hunting weaboo's and know what world and what time he did his leveling to even try to go the "he botted" route. It's a waste of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_i6mjiGerU
People are talking like this is only 20 accounts.
As I type this there are over 70 of them in Limsa based on Player Search results. And they've logged in with over 215 separate accounts since 7.25.
They've been doing this for years, including some spicy racist chat in the past.
At the very minimum you could consider it harassment since they're bragging about creating over 200 accounts to circumvent the blacklist limit.
If you go through their twitter replies, it's also abundantly clear that they're doing this to harass people.
1) as stated before, multiple people each running around 15-20.
2) the amount of accounts doesn't even actually matter because:
3) As defined by Square Enix "Harassment" is speech and/or behavior that inflicts deep emotional distress on another person. Being AFK with a lot of characters is not going to qualify as inflicting deep emotional distress.
and
4) Circumventing the blacklist isn't against ToS. What you're looking for under Prohibited Behaviors is:
"Creating new characters to message someone who has blacklisted you, despite being asked to stop the behavior."
Because there's no contacting of someone who has blacklisted them, there is no violation. If Person A blacklists Person B, Person B could've made a new character pre-dawntrail or makes a secondary service account for multitasking and that second character is now "circumventing" Person A's blacklist. But if there's no contact with Person A, Person A is not able to file a ticket just from them creating a new character/account. Even if they did contact Person A, there's still the requirement of being asked to stop the contact behavior because Person B may not even know Person A blacklisted them to begin with. People need to stop thinking about "what should be violations", and actually going into the prohibited behaviors and linking text that is directly what is being done. A GM's standard of harassment, of nuisance, of scamming, of stalking, are sometimes drastically different from what the community's is.
5) Another problem is that every ticket needs a specific victim, and has to be filed by a victim. You cannot file a ticket on behalf of someone else (people have tried, GM's will reply and confirm this). So you end up a situation where you have to explain to a GM, that they created new accounts just to "harass" YOU specifically. And you have to remember, that harassment is, once more, deep emotional distress. To say other people would suffer deep emotional distress (which would still be a failed ticket), or the community suffers deep emotional distress, over an AFK character, is an auto-close ticket. If he's not messaging you to brag to you specifically about circumventing YOUR blacklist, it doesn't matter. And even if he did, you have to ask him to stop the behavior before it becomes a violation. Now if you don't like that protocol, that's feedback for Square Enix because they made that requirement and it's a repeated theme throughout Prohibited Behaviors.
I hope one day you realise, Garu, that this habit you have of calling anybody who disagrees with you a "troll", "cheater" or "botter" to try and delegitimise their perspective and sully their reputation is why nobody cares about all the good work you've done over the years helping generations of sprouts when they dogpile on you for your holier-than-thou attitude and expectation that everybody plays the game the way you personally think it should be played.
There is at least circumstantial evidence to the contrary here: I have witnessed this person logging on and positioning accounts at least half a dozen times in the last month and at no point has there been more than one character logging in and/or moving at once. In addition, even if it were a small collective doing this I do not see how it has any bearing on the ethics of what's happening here.
There are several people I've chatted with who would disagree. One person I have chatted with last night mentioned that they felt like crying as the newest batch logged in since it finally exceeded their blacklist.
I'd argue that their behavior would quality under 3.2 - Disruption at the very least since people who don't want to see them are denied use of their blacklist, but as mentioned in the Prohibited activities FAQ directly linked in the ToS, the list of prohibited activities is a guideline, not an exhaustive list.
I think what you're running into is called the Appeal to Law fallacy. We're arguing that something should be done, while you're arguing about how their behavior "technically doesn't fit into the traditional guidelines for actionable violations." Square Enix has clearly left themselves enough leeway to do something about this, and obviously this is a person with a clear malicious intent abusing the service to harass the playerbase.
They have an obsession with body dismorphia, which is why they have an army of muscle men and talk about lalafells. They also have a humiliation fetish and run to a new server to hide their shame when people get too close to the truth with them.
Honestly, I'm quite convinced at this point you're not even arguing in good faith.
Do you think that Square Enix should set the bar of harassment to "bad enough to elicit a therapist?" Obviously we all react differently and have different frustrations in our lives, but it's clear that a great number of people are being harassed, and from their twitter replies it's equally obvious that the harassment is their intention. If that doesn't make it clear that it is indeed harassment, I am not sure what would.
I doubt you're new to the game, but the language of that page was only minimally updated with the Dawntrail changes to the blacklist. If hiding other players wasn't an intended use, they wouldn't have revamped the entire blacklist system to add that functionality, advertised it as a major feature in their anniversary live letter, and create a separate "mute list" for the old functionality.
In that same section of the live letter I linked, Yoshi-P alludes to this kind of harassment as something they were trying to address with the blacklist update, so clearly to some degree they are trying to address the issue. Ideally they eventually have more tools (or already have the tools) to address situations like this more effectively (such as hardware-level bans), but in the meantime yes, I do believe that taking action against these accounts is a good use of time. It takes significantly more time and effort for the person running these accounts to create and level them than it does to ban them. And almost as importantly, it signals to the griefer and countless players who have been complaining about this person's conduct both on and off of the game that harassment of this type won't be tolerated.
1) The only time your opinion/feelings matter, is when someone else says that they matter, someone has to GIVE you that power. In the space that we exist, Square Enix is the only entity that gets to decide that. So when Square Enix doesn't care, a health care professional would tell you in nicer terms, to suck it up and deal with it. Because you are not in a position to do anything, and going around day to day pissed off at your lack of power is only going to make your life even worse.
2) They mute list does not cover every functionality of the old blacklist. The old blacklist covered chat as well as inviting to party, showing in PF, opening trade, etc.
3) The exact wording is "in addition to", not instead of, not alternatively. That means an added benefit, not meant to become sole purpose of.
4) Square Enix already has hardware bans. You can literally find youtube videos and github explanations and step by step guides of how to get around hardware bans for ff14 specifically. There are even scripts that will change your hardware information for you and automate the process. If you're not a console player, and you have a decent bit of knowledge of computers and know how to use Google, a hardware ban is relatively nothing. The payment method/personal informations bans are normally the more devastating versions but we're talking about free trials that have fake info to begin with.
5) He doesn't even have to level them. You could be level 2 and be inside of limsa for everyone to see. If you can manually create a new account in 3-5minutes, one day of work of let's say 12 hours, is 144 accounts. 1 day of his time, and he has potentially 14 waves of 10 characters, and you're only wiping maybe 2-3 a day because a GM is not going to be on call. They have other obligations I'm not even at liberty to discuss publicly in terms of things they do every day in the office.
6) The group has already trolled GM's. I found this one in DM's, but if I had access to the group discord still, I'd be able to go back and find the screenshot where one time someone in the group had the following interaction:
GM: Give me one moment while I file the paperwork on your account.
Them: Give me one moment while I open another client.
https://i.imgur.com/C1Dekrh.png
Literally the person who ran the discord has been in shout chat in the past and called Yoshi P a "word associated with the nsfw lalafell activity" and got hardware banned for it, and still came back, and laughed about it. And still played the game for 2+ years afterward. Banned over 40 times, including hardware and personal information, and STILL had houses and a leveled account at Dawntrail launch.
The people you think will hear your emotions and ban them are the same people who send this to them in the past:
https://i.imgur.com/9pFeZma.png
There is no win condition for you, but like I said, if you want to keep fighting, go ahead.
Yo, I was down with the whole mediocre humor Roegadyn walling but racism and transphobia? Yikes.
I know when I teleport to Limsa Lominsa with them and everyone else afk my fps goes down to the single digits. Most the time I see 30 or more of them afk in one spot. Saying rude comments about Lalas.