Learn your history lesson: Witch Hunts DO cause innocents to be banned
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ter_months_of/
Hi everyone, I wanted to bring some awareness and light into a harassment issue that has been going on for months within the JP community between twitter and 5ch (bashing, impersonation, fabricated evidence...), and one that ended on a sad note today for this japanese player which got harassed for months, finally got banned from the game completely. He does not have the means to type this kind of message as he doesn't know english very well, so I'm doing it on his behalf with the help of one of his friends that can sort of communicate in english with me to explain the details.
Tl;dr: Some of you might know about the Koike Incident that happened in Japan, related to ACT and player harassment; this case is sort of similar to that one, but it didn't end on the same note as the person getting targeted was just a normal player called Dingo. He got harassed and pushed away from the JP community by a bunch of anonymous bullies, moved servers and changed names a massive amount of times in hopes of being left alone, until he got permabanned. He wanted to share what happened to him to the world so people have more awareness about it. LONG POST AHEAD WITH THE DETAILS.
Dingo used to be just a normal XIV player using twitter for screenshots and the forums, during September he made a lodestone forum post about the current state of WAR, and later some people discovered that the text was originally made by someone else on twitter and Dingo copypasted it without giving credit for it. After being accused for it, he apologized publicly on his twitter, but a few hours later he made a post in his alt account that said "sigh, had a rough day today, people are too sensitive", someone following that account found that message disrespectful and brought it up to 5ch, that's how this whole thing started.
In Japan the culture of doxing seems to be pretty set in stone, where they pick a target online and bash the hell out of them until the target commits suicide or leaves the community. People are extremely stressed up in their society and are always looking for a prey in 5ch to use as a punching bag while keeping themselves anonymous, and this time, Dingo was their prey.
After this, people started digging for everything he could have, trying to find a reason to get him banned, and his usage of cosmetic mods became one of these materials. Besides mods, he also had multiple tweets talking crap about people he had met during duties, like DF vents (which everyone of us has done at some point), not doxing. All of these were posted to 5ch, hundreds of people reported him based on all these posts.
To this, Dingo deleted his twitter ID and made a new one, and that's when the main harasser of this case comes from, a guy known in their community as "Chikubert", this person took that twitter ID and started posting EVERY SINGLE screenshot that Dingo had uploaded, criticizing about how the usage of mods can cause XIV to "shutdown" and all other sorts of nonsense.
After all these reports and bashing on 5ch, he was suspended for 10 days, and the bullying came to a close temporarily.
From September to November the 5ch threads were as good as dead, 3-5 posts a day and all these people started moving on. But not Chikubert, he relentlessly kept making tweets against Dingo every single day, even when they got zero interactions or replies. This guy was desperately attempting to make his life feel better by getting acknowledged as a "hero" in 5ch, as that's how they call people that provide material there for people to bash on. Though he wasn't getting much attention as people were already done with Dingo, but he didn't want to stop there.
When Dingo made a post with his TEA Axe after clearing TEA with his static, this person and his crew started exposing every single member of his static and started screaming things like "These guys are accepting Dingo in their static!! These guys are trying to ruin FFXIV!! Gotta burn them all!!" on both 5ch and twitter. After this the 5ch thread started to become more active again and people came back to bash on him because there was no better target at the time. Haters started throwing accusations such as "Dingo bought his clear and didn't actually do it", "Dingo used hacks to clear", "Dingo is a dogshit player" and so on.
And so Chikubert had an idea to catch people's attention yet again. He posted a cropped screenshot from a "contributor" which had proof that Dingo was using a famous botting tool for XIV, to show everyone that he was using hacks to play his WAR. 5ch obviously blew up over this and hundreds of people started accusing him of using hacks, but this evidence looked fishy, and people started noticing things in the screenshot (not showing hotbars and just a cropped screenshot, the existence of a certain tool that lets you change your appearance locally and even your titles and gear, as well as finding no record of Dingo allegedly posting to the bot's forum). People pointed this out, and he was asked to show the DMs to proof that he didn't prepare this himself, to which he just "roleplayed" with another account about receiving a DM and having a conversation, but people in 5ch ate that one up. This botting screenshot was completely fabricated to fuel their hatred.
All of these statements were immediately labeled as "Dingo" by JP people and they started exposing his FC, Linkshells, friends and static members, basically every single person who was related to Dingo and exposed him to them as a hacker, a mod user, and someone trying to destroy FFXIV.
Since that moment Dingo was watched by these stalkers on a daily basis, whenever he joined a static, FC or LS, members would get harassed until Dingo leaves or gets kicked, and whatever posts he would make on twitter or discord would get monitored and posted on 5ch as well. All of this while believing they were doing it in behalf of Yoshida, like saviours of XIV.
This was everything up until 3 days ago when I found out about all of this (I used to follow his original account and lost track of him until now), and decided to give him a hand since with these issues, japanese people are afraid of helping publicly in fear of becoming the next target. In those three days I had the chance of seeing many japanese people look away from this, as well as multiple of them voicing their reasonings to me, here's a few examples of what they said:
"He is a sinner and is trying to end XIV"
"Mods are against the terms of service and he deserves to be punished"
"Yoshida will remove Gpose if modded screenshots are allowed to continue"
Are mods against the ToS? Yes. And so are parsers, and triggers, and everything else that people use. And not all japanese players are against mods either, multiple of them even do it in public accounts and they didn't get any of this kind of traction. But the harassers weren't going to stop no matter how much of anything western players could say to them, they didn't see this as harassment, they saw it as rightful punishment, and so they weren't doing anything wrong in their eyes.
And so yesterday, the 16th, after a mass reporting of his in-game character, he got permabanned by the hand of a GM that only had screencaps of old tweets and discord to go by (his current account was locked). As I've been told, this issue was becoming really big in Japan across social media, about mods and Dingo. People suspect that the dev team did notice this, and what they did to end the situation was to ban the harassed person completely. NONE of the abusers were banned or suffered any sort of consequence for this crusade.
Now this didn't end here as they're still resentful against mods and anyone that shows mods in public, so they are somehow trying to go after western XIV players that post those modded screenshots on Twitter/Discord. Personally I don't think they can do anything given the language barrier and cultural barrier, but if you do use mods and upload screenshots online, do not post screenshots that might show your in-game name, or anything that might link you to that character, both in-game/lodestone and social media.
I do not enjoy this kind of behaviour against a single player at all and I'm glad that some japanese players decide to voice their support even if it wasn't on public. The bullies ended up getting what they wanted and nobody actually deserves this, he had no way of stopping the abuse as he wasn't getting attacked directly by any player, and no matter how much he changed names or servers he was not able to play in peace.
The character ID on Lodestone is used heavily for stalking and I'm surprised there's no way to ask for a change in cases like this one, makes all you do to move around and change your name completely worthless and I wish S-E actually had some measures for this kind of targetting.
Edit: As for sources, I've been told I can't link the twitter profiles here, but it's a big enough incident that you can easily find it under "Dingo XIV" through twitter search.
Edit 2: Some screencaps I've grabbed from twitter/5ch, hiding names so it should be okay. (Description for each of them found inside the album)
Edit 3: I've talked with Dingo a bit, he's very grateful of all the people around the world supporting him on this, gave him the strenght to not give up as he was feeling very exhausted for all of this. Also that most of the things on his wiki page are fabricated, only the WAR lodestone forum post remains true (aside from using cosmetic mods).
Edit 4 and last: For anyone coming here after the LL where Yoshida talked about mods and curious of how it ended, Dingo tried to ban appeal for his account but was denied, so between starting with a new character and retiring from the game, he decided it was time to quit. Right now he's living peacefully after leaving this phase of his life behind. (And no mentions from Yoshida about harassment over mods btw, their priorities are straight.)
