Regarding the Revision of the Prohibited Activities and Account Penalty Policy

[Kaedan]

Just confirmed with my wife too, who is Japanese (and read the announcement in Japanese and watched the videos where Yoshida explains) and she confirmed. You won't be punished simply because someone "feels offended" and reports you. They will go over logs and investigate before any action is taken, and they will actually punish false reporting quite severely as well. It isn't simply about "I feel offended" and that's enough. It has to actually fall into objective guidelines of essentially what amounts to "d-bag" behavior.

Repeat, it's not carte blanche to report anyone you feel like and claim you were offended.

[JunseiKei]

Okay. FFXIV finally updated their rules to basically be the same as other MMOs. This change should have happened much sooner, but better late than never.

What other people that are panicking over is you need to be able to prove these. If you cannot prove intent (which is actually hard, depending on the infraction), then there's likely to be no punishment. Stop panicking.

[cougarel]

Just confirmed with my wife too, who is Japanese (and read the announcement in Japanese and watched the videos where Yoshida explains) and she confirmed. You won't be punished simply because someone "feels offended" and reports you. They will go over logs and investigate before any action is taken, and they will actually punish false reporting quite severely as well. It isn't simply about "I feel offended" and that's enough. It has to actually fall into objective guidelines of essentially what amounts to "d-bag" behavior.

Repeat, it's not carte blanche to report anyone you feel like and claim you were offended.

Yeah, looking back at the 20 pages from this post....from where i think there are like 4-5 people which kept saying this....well...the outcome is better burn down the village before the ogre comes.

[Hamada]

we will continue to explore ways to provide a better environment for the community. Feel free to let us know if there are certain topics you would like us to improve upon.

Thank you for your continued support of FINAL FANTASY XIV!

I hope you increase requirements for the barriers of entry for the duty finder because now I can't talk to people that gear poorly and bypass ilevel requirements (or gear poorly in general for dungeons that have no barrier of entry), you are basically telling us wait 5-20 minutes in a queue, then drop dungeon when there is trolling because we can't kick them now because it is "harassment" under this. So that leads to 50 minutes of downtime because of bad policy making and likely to repeat a few times every day. Yeah this is not a good change.

[Blum4vi]

I think a system that would automatically delete people's service accounts whenever they have any other windows open, when their game folder isn't bit perfect or when they type "disagree", "don't", any swear word in four languages, "free DLC" would be more acceptable since it's at least precise.
I understand that "cyber bullying" is a real problem but does that really mean we should all cover ourselves with shells, lest we oppose some random person?
Meanwhile thousands of bots free teleporting all across the game world, killing mobs from outside the bounds of play area, these bots creating Free Companies and trading their gains to god knows who rich player who then makes profit in game and/or IRL do and WILL continue.
I don't blame Square Enix, the GM team or anyone really. Bad times we live in. When winter comes, you either be a snowflake or end up buried under them.

[Aulainn]

Just confirmed with my wife too, who is Japanese (and read the announcement in Japanese and watched the videos where Yoshida explains) and she confirmed. You won't be punished simply because someone "feels offended" and reports you. They will go over logs and investigate before any action is taken, and they will actually punish false reporting quite severely as well. It isn't simply about "I feel offended" and that's enough. It has to actually fall into objective guidelines of essentially what amounts to "d-bag" behavior.

Repeat, it's not carte blanche to report anyone you feel like and claim you were offended.

Mind giving a link to this video you're referring to? Also, the announcement was the same even in japanese with not much different wording, the few comments in the thread there are also a bit confused or concerned about the vagueness.

[Moshantu]

・Discriminatory expressions based on race/nationality/thinking/gender/sexual orientation/gender identity
・Discriminatory expressions about a state/religion/occupation/organisation, etc.
・Obscene/indecent expressions
・Actions that inflict emotional distress using content related to historical events or crimes
・Stalking
・Disclosing or indicating personal information such as contact details with the aim of meeting up in the real world
・Disclosing or indicating another person's real world personal information without permission
・Other actions that are generally regarded as actions that inflict deep emotional distress on another person

Can we get some clarification on how these rules will affect people who engage in role-play in public channels such as /say?

Whenever a role-player is in-character, they may say things to another player (who is also in-character) that break these rules. Of course, saying things and behaving in-character does not represent the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of us as players. But interpersonal conflict can arise in role-play.

If onlookers see this and report a role-player, will the role-player get in trouble? Can other role-players report me if we have an in-character disagreement and they want to be spiteful about it? If there are reasonable exemptions made for role-players, how do you plan to handle rule-breakers that use "I was just role-playing!" as an excuse to escape punishment when, in fact, they were not role-playing?

I'm not sure if these rules are an unwritten encouragement to keep all role-play in private channels from now on or what, but that may be what it comes to!

[MistakeNot]

It has to actually fall into objective guidelines of essentially what amounts to "d-bag" behavior.

What are those objective guidelines?
Would be nice to know what the de facto rules are.

[HyoMinPark]

Okay. FFXIV finally updated their rules to basically be the same as other MMOs. This change should have happened much sooner, but better late than never.

What other people that are panicking over is you need to be able to prove these. If you cannot prove intent (which is actually hard, depending on the infraction), then there's likely to be no punishment. Stop panicking.

The sad thing is, is that they addressed “intent” with regards to the “Nuisance Behavior” portion of this:

■Nuisance behaviour
"Nuisance behaviour" means speech or behaviour that hurts others or obstructs game play, but which is not classified as harassment. Even if it was not the intention, a penalty may be imposed if the end result was that another person was hurt or obstructed.

Why are they going to enact a penalty on someone if they, as you said, cannot necessarily prove intent? This clause basically says that they have the right to penalize someone simply because someone else’s feelings were hurt, whether or not it was the intention of the other party to hurt said feelings.

Just confirmed with my wife too, who is Japanese (and read the announcement in Japanese and watched the videos where Yoshida explains) and she confirmed. You won't be punished simply because someone "feels offended" and reports you.

If that’s the case, the English guidelines do a poor job of conveying it.

It isn't simply about "I feel offended" and that's enough.

See the portion of text that I quoted above for JunseiKei. That clause gives off the impression that they will punish regardless of intent because “my feelings”.

It has to actually fall into objective guidelines of essentially what amounts to "d-bag" behavior.

What are these? They haven’t provided anything but broad statements that can be interpreted any which way. Which is the entire point people are trying to make.

[Moshantu]

Why are they going to enact a penalty on someone if they, as you said, cannot necessarily prove intent? This clause basically says that they have the right to penalize someone simply because someone else’s feelings were hurt, whether or not it was the intention of the other party to hurt said feelings.

I believe what this means is if someone says or does something that is an objective nuisance, but not with the -intent- to be a nuisance, they can be punished. Of course, the first punishment isn't an immediate ban, just a cautionary statement, so most of it will stop at that. If they weren't doing it with intent, they likely didn't realize it was causing problems. Being told it's problematic will -probably- be enough.

To give an example of what I believe the nuisance behavior rule to mean would be to say something you assume to be positive about someone but that positive thing still relies on stereotypes. Like if you find out your FC mate is a certain ethnicity so you say "You must be good at <useful skill that ethnicity is supposedly good at>, haha!" some people think that's -not- racism because it's a statement about being -good- at something that's a boon to be good at, but it -is- still racism. Although now that I type out this example, I'm half-afraid -I'll- be reported even though I tried my best to be clear without using specifics. OH WELL.