Friends list need a revamp now.

It is irresponsible for the devs of this game to allow people to stay on each others friends list when they want to cut off contact. There is no reason a game to allow this. If someone is removed from my friends list or put on my blacklist, it should remove me from their friends list. This game does a extremely poor job of protecting its players. And before a GM or someone else says just report them, that does not work as well as it should. The issues should be addressed before they become issues. Enough is enough.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ThatQEDguy

It is irresponsible for the devs of this game to allow people to stay on each others friends list when they want to cut off contact. There is no reason a game to allow this. If someone is removed from my friends list or put on my blacklist, it should remove me from their friends list. This game does a extremely poor job of protecting its players. And before a GM or someone else says just report them, that does not work as well as it should. The issues should be addressed before they become issues. Enough is enough.

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Agreed. Players have been saying this for a while now, I believe, but SE keeps turning a blind eye to the issue.

A small list of what can be done currently:

If you are mutual friends with someone and you suffered abuse from them, as soon as you unfriend and blacklist them, you haven given them a ton of power over you. Whenever you unfriendly someone, it only does it for your side. You will still be on their friends list until they remove you. The only thing the blacklist does is the following:
Sending tells
Teleporting to your house/apartment/FC(From your menu)
Joining your PF
Trading
Inspecting your adventure plate

Things unconfirmed, but possible:
Porting to your house/fc if you use someone else's port list


Here is what they can do(if prior friends):
See your online status(includes duties you're in or other worlds)
See your search info
Request melds/repairs
(If following) lodestone info
Join parties if someone else is leader

Additional info:
If you were Eternal bonded with someone and you rescind the bond, It only does it for your end. Their ring will still work to teleport to you. This is unacceptable regardless of what mindset Yoshi P has.

I know some suggested ways to combat this is to report them. But it's very hard to prove that someone is stalking you if you port to the same area. They could easily say they just happened to go there for a unrelated reason. It's also hard to know if any action was taken since generally, you don't get any notification if anything was done.

The only way to be rid of someone attempting to stalk you is to completely move Data Regions since DC travel is a thing now. This should not be a thing still yet it still is. I understand that Yoshi P doesn't want to do it because of a JP mindset, but he needs to come to terms that bad people play this game and he needs to protect players.

I really hope I'm not the only one that sees this as an issue.

Q: When I delete a person from my friends list, I want my character to disappear from theirs, as well!

Yoshida: That would lead to the problem of “Why did he delete me?” and might cause trouble, so we didn’t do that on purpose.

Full interview:https://gamerescape.com/2019/01/04/y...-yoshi-p-walk/

In addition to all of these really serious issues, the list itself is just laggy as hell. If you have a lot of people on your list, the game needs to load them all every single time you open it before it'll actually show you your sorted list of online friends, and it loads them 10 at a time.
Going further, if your friend is on another world or another DC at the time, it might not even show them as being online until you find them on your list and then manually click the little ball next to their name. Then you have to wait a few seconds for it to think, and then it'll tell you that, oh, actually this person is offline.
And if you ever wanna clean your friends list up??? Every time you delete someone, it reloads the entire list over again. Like, it doesn't even try to remember this info to expedite things. It's so so bad. There's not even a way to message everyone on your friends list at once. If I have 10 people online on my friends list, I have to send them /tells one at a time, and half the time the /tell won't even go through for some dubious reason. Maplestory came out in like 2004 and even they had just a basic buddy chat channel where all your messages sent through there were broadcast to everyone on your friends list.

And all of that is without mentioning the most glaring issues of all which OP has already brought up in great detail. Honestly, the risks associated with befriending strangers combined with the utter uselessness of the friends system in general has made me not even want to add people anymore. What's the point? They go on a list that I can barely access, and then what. It's easier to put the people you like in a CWLS or something. Then if they turn out to be crazy you can just remove them from it. And you can also talk to them easily.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ThatQEDguy

A small list of what can be done currently:

If you are mutual friends with someone and you suffered abuse from them, as soon as you unfriend and blacklist them, you haven given them a ton of power over you. Whenever you unfriendly someone, it only does it for your side. You will still be on their friends list until they remove you. The only thing the blacklist does is the following:
Sending tells
Teleporting to your house/apartment/FC(From your menu)
Joining your PF
Trading
Inspecting your adventure plate

Things unconfirmed, but possible:
Porting to your house/fc if you use someone else's port list


Here is what they can do(if prior friends):
See your online status(includes duties you're in or other worlds)
See your search info
Request melds/repairs
(If following) lodestone info
Join parties if someone else is leader

Additional info:
If you were Eternal bonded with someone and you rescind the bond, It only does it for your end. Their ring will still work to teleport to you. This is unacceptable regardless of what mindset Yoshi P has.

I know some suggested ways to combat this is to report them. But it's very hard to prove that someone is stalking you if you port to the same area. They could easily say they just happened to go there for a unrelated reason. It's also hard to know if any action was taken since generally, you don't get any notification if anything was done.

The only way to be rid of someone attempting to stalk you is to completely move Data Regions since DC travel is a thing now. This should not be a thing still yet it still is. I understand that Yoshi P doesn't want to do it because of a JP mindset, but he needs to come to terms that bad people play this game and he needs to protect players.

I really hope I'm not the only one that sees this as an issue.

Q: When I delete a person from my friends list, I want my character to disappear from theirs, as well!

Yoshida: That would lead to the problem of “Why did he delete me?” and might cause trouble, so we didn’t do that on purpose.

Full interview:https://gamerescape.com/2019/01/04/y...-yoshi-p-walk/

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They need to give an ability to blacklist the person via Square Enix account to block all future characters made rather then just via the character too.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ThatQEDguy

It is irresponsible for the devs of this game to allow people to stay on each others friends list when they want to cut off contact. There is no reason a game to allow this. If someone is removed from my friends list or put on my blacklist, it should remove me from their friends list. This game does a extremely poor job of protecting its players. And before a GM or someone else says just report them, that does not work as well as it should. The issues should be addressed before they become issues. Enough is enough.

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I only learned of this quite recently actually. For the longest time I thought removing a friend in game was the same as any other game. It severs the tie on both ends but apparently not. Now, I've never had to make use of this feature before (though my friends list is almost full 190/200 and takes forever to load. So maybe they can fix that part to.)

But at least as it was explained to me from friends it's sort of like a Japanese culture thing, like, they don't want there to be social awkwardness amongst players or something... But to me this would only create more awkward situations because you could hate someones guts after getting to know more about them and so you take them off your friends list only for them to approach you and start talking to you because on their end any way you are both still friends. That's so weird.

(Edit) Oh I see now it's actually from an interview.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ThatQEDguy

I really hope I'm not the only one that sees this as an issue.

Q: When I delete a person from my friends list, I want my character to disappear from theirs, as well!

Yoshida: That would lead to the problem of “Why did he delete me?” and might cause trouble, so we didn’t do that on purpose.

Full interview:https://gamerescape.com/2019/01/04/y...-yoshi-p-walk/

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Yeah, that's so weird. Must be a Japanese thing - Suicide rates there are quite an issue. So perhaps doing something like that may make someone very depressed... so they figure it is best to avoid that. Though the truth will be revealed eventually you know? I don't know. If I had to hazard a guess I'd assume it's not possible to change how it works on a regional level.

I really wish this had been a thing about two years ago when I unfriended and blocked a guy everywhere else because he got kicked from my FC for being a sex pest.

Didn't know at the time that I still showed up on his friend's list. He spammed my tells in game for 30m straight asking me why I blocked him and followed me from area to area. It should have been as simple as I unfriend him, he can no longer see if I'm on and what area I'm in through the friend's list. But no.

Square NEEDS to update this for safety reasons as soon as possible. I got lucky because my FC officers knew the dude in real life and they told him to cut it out. Others are not so lucky.

The friends list is the way it is right now for two reasons:
1. It's already been put on paper that it's partially related to JP culture where they basically don't want to put anyone into a bad position by being deleted/rejected by someone else.
2. The friends list, in the eyes of SE, isn't meant to be a list for just anyone. It's meant for people you actually call a friend and know to an extent to trust them that they won't randomly go psycho at any moment (which is completely backwards compared to how a lot of people play MMOs lol).

I did a little bit of digging though and apparently a fix is in the works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUT35H6P2Xs <- found in this video
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ch_option_qol/ <- referenced from this reddit post

No idea if it's still being worked on but apparently it was said by Yoshi.

I'd like to also throw Eternity Rings into the conversation as I'm fairly sure even if one person turns in the ring it doesn't break the teleportation effect that comes with it, even if you transfer servers. So Person A turns in their ring for a divorce and transfers, Person B keeps ring and DC-travels to their new server and can use the ring again to follow them.

Smol indie company pls understand

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ThatQEDguy

It is irresponsible for the devs of this game to allow people to stay on each others friends list when they want to cut off contact. There is no reason a game to allow this.

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Actually, there is. The reason Yoshi-P gave was that if you know someone removed you, it might hurt your feelings. They don't want you to be hurt and sad, they want you to be happy.

Quote:

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If someone is removed from my friends list or put on my blacklist, it should remove me from their friends list.

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Maybe it should do it when you blacklist them, but not for mere removal then.

Absolutely agreed. Yoshi-P and the devs need to do a better job of improving player security. I know people who have moved to entirely new regional centers because they were still being stalked and harassed even after unadding the perpetrator. I understand it's JP customs but it's getting out of hand.

There is another thing missing from security. When we look up a player on the lodestone out character ID number is displayed for all to see. Sadly it persists. Change name and data center too bad so sad if your stalker knows that ID number they can find you. It doesn't change when you do. That number needs to be removed from display on the lodestone.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Actually, there is. The reason Yoshi-P gave was that if you know someone removed you, it might hurt your feelings. They don't want you to be hurt and sad, they want you to be happy.

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I will be very honest. If someone wants to go no contact, they will not care about their feelings nor should they. They want to go No contact for a reason

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Maybe it should do it when you blacklist them, but not for mere removal then.

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It should just do it. There's no reason this is the only game out there that does social systems like this.

The FL needs a much bigger capacity first. Especially when they enable cross DC traveling.



Cheers

Tangentially related, but it is truly bizarre to me that you can't make your Lodestone profile completely private and unviewable. I've had to change my in-game name due to stalking and having someone sending me death threats to the extent it resulted in filing reports with law enforcement. It's really unsafe that you can basically continue to stalk someone in-game by just... googling their old character name and because your character is tied to a unique user id it'll still pop up in google and they can keep tabs on you.

There's so many horror stories about people getting stalked for weeks or months on end because someone on their friend list turned out to be a weirdo. Wanting to spare your players' feelings is a nice sentiment and all, but realistically, a few bruised egos are a lesser evil than players becoming miserable and quitting your game forever because they can't login to their character without someone stalking them.

Pick your friends better.
I have 20 friends in my list since 2.0
Most I talk to in and out of the game

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kewitt

Pick your friends better.
I have 20 friends in my list since 2.0
Most I talk to in and out of the game

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It's kinda crazy that you think this is an acceptable answer to this. If you want to stick to 20 friends, that's on you. If others like making friends with others, let them and give them the option to cut them off if needed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ThatQEDguy

It's kinda crazy that you think this is an acceptable answer to this. If you want to stick to 20 friends, that's on you. If others like making friends with others, let them and give them the option to cut them off if needed.

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If you need to cut someone off they where never really your friend.

Irl and ig friends I would go the extra mile for they don't even need to ask.

I'm in my 40s I've only ever broken one friendship off and that was because I had a one person intervention. 2 year later we met up and he told me that was the snap back to reality he needed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kewitt

If you need to cut someone off they where never really your friend.

Irl and ig friends I would go the extra mile for they don't even need to ask.

I'm in my 40s I've only ever broken one friendship off and that was because I had a one person intervention. 2 year later we met up and he told me that was the snap back to reality he needed.

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Just because you haven't had someone in your life do something that goes against your moral compass, doesn't mean it never happens. People sometimes do very bad things behind your back. If you have never had that happen, good, I am happy for you. Some of us aren't that luck. I do not care how old you are. That has no meaning here.