Roleplay/Partyfinder Discrepancies & Policy Enforcement by GM's

[RickmanUK]

A bunch of people in the Roleplay community were behaving the exact same way when it was announced that Ultimate was cancelled; They showed up in twitter threads, reddit posts and forum posts where they didn't belong and mercilessly made fun of people they'd never met for losing out on something they were looking forward to.

I don't do Savage/Ultimates (Have Fibromyalgia so... wrists love to play up at the worst of times), but I don't and never will have anything against those that enjoy it. It's a shame that some people did that and acted out.

[Furrysparks]

There is nothing in the party finder or ToS to suggest that using the party finder to make a part of people to be social with is something wrong or to be warned or even banned for. Even if you dont like RP you just dont have to do it.

People put tons of work into these RP houses, and its even the reason a lot of people play this game. I have a FC of around 10-20 active players, and most of them if not all of them would have unsubscribed months ago if not for the roleplay venues in the party finder. Its a great way to be social in game, hurts NO ONE, and I literally cant understand why this would be something that would be worth a warning.

There's a RP status in the game already.. why would anyone assume that putting a party together for an activity that is encouraged by the game in the game? If people continue getting warned for stuff like this Im just not going to play anymore, I only play to be with friends and if my friends arent playing because theyre getting warned for using the party finder to find a party then Im out too.

[Lore_Rowena]

You're right, we need to make a new tab for Market so the crafters have a place to sell their wares.

We can nuke the brothels in the T rated game though. Or, more accurately, send them deep underground.

I guess you completely forgot about the Beehive in Eulmore that the developers put into the game

[trdl23]

Ultimately, Final Fantasy XIV is a product by Square Enix. You don't get special treatment because you are a consumer that is paying for the product. When you create a profile, you agreed to their Terms of Service, which many of us probably don't read until it's convenient for us for the sake of rules lawyering. However, this is not a courtroom. The person in control is Square Enix, and they can enforce which rules they want to enforce and which ones they deem are too harmless to enforce. I understand the feeling like there's a double standard for "why do E/RP PFs get taken down but AFK Clubs can survive? aren't they also breaking the rules?" but clearly no one cares for the latter, people are only making a stink of the former. They can mediate as they please and frankly they don't even need to give or owe anyone a reason as to any actions they may take.

Please refer to this post: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5511158

Yes, we agreed to the Terms of Service, and Square has discretion as to how those are enforced, even if we find the enforcement policy bewildering at best. The problem is, as the linked post demonstrates, there is no reasonable case for many of these "offenders" to be guilty of a ToS violation. There also is no publicly available rule even outside the ToS dictating what the "proper" use of Party Finder is aside from "share common goals." Again, if you can find something I have missed, feel free to correct me, and I will concede the point.

Uneven enforcement of a rule is one thing. Enforcing a nonexistent rule is something else entirely. If there are more rules than are known publicly, then why haven't they been made public so that people can avoid violation?

[EthanParcival]

Come on Dev team, you already gave us a RP icon for our name tags to indicate we're role playing. Why not give us a "Role play" tab on party finder so people can filter it out and we be done with this? Do us a solid.

It would only take a developer a few hours, it could be squeezed in on a hotfix and we could put this ugly and pointless debate behind us.

[PikoAliapoh]

Seems there are two separate issues here:

1. Using PF for RP advertising.

2. Whether the content and type of RP being publicly advertised is appropriate or not.

Not going to address the second debate, because that's tangential to the original point of this thread and the OP's post.

The idea that RPers should use Fellowships for advertising open RP venues just doesn't serve the same function that PF serves. If a group of RPers opens their establishment to the public for a specific span of time, say 5-8pm on a given night. They aren't going to be able to advertise that in Fellowships where interested people can find them to come for one night for a specific period of time.

As far as I've seen, Fellowships are more for creating permanent social networks that can be checked in on. That's great if you already have an established group of RPers who might check in on it to come to your establishment. But that just doesn't work for deciding "Hey, we're open tonight! People are welcome to come and RP!" and putting that message out there to any random player on the server who might be looking for RP and interested in coming.

At the end of the day, this is just going to push people away from using XIV's in-game features, and push RPers to move to Discord and other platforms to organize and advertise their events.

It's a shame that an mmoRPg is punishing its own community for RPing.

[Ameela]

Thank god Square is finally putting their foot down and removing those inappropriate PF listings for brothels and such, wouldn't want children being exposed to that kind of content.

[Aslae]

I guess you completely forgot about the Beehive in Eulmore that the developers put into the game

Or the underage girl that strips her clothes off in a savage fight? (E8S)

[Afkland]

I would love to see a Social Event Finder added to the game, and I don't mean Fellowships, they don't work the same.

It could function basically as a stripped down/cloned Party Finder, allowing the person listing to list it as Social or Role Play, and the icon displayed by their name (much like for people who are in Party Finder) could reflect that status (Such as a recolored RP tag). There could be a 'report inappropriate listing' type option like for RMT in chat. They could probably enable using the icons housing uses (venue, visitors welcome, cafe etc etc) to flag each event type.

It would take the social events out of the PF, and give the community a tool that it clearly wants.

[GaleMex]

It's a shame that an mmoRPg is punishing its own community for RPing.

I don't think anyone really gives a hoot about RPers and RPing. If you're so deeply bothered by their existence, you need to reorganize your priorities. I think the takeaway was adult-oriented (or, as some people in this thread like to fling around, ERP) roleplaying. To some extent I agree why someone would be heated about ERP in a rated T game that likely has a significant amount of teenagers playing them. Anti-ERP, even if I don't fully agree with it, is a much different stance than an anti-RP stance.