Will there be an official response about Party Finder advertising?

[Saefinn]

I will add, as the concern of the welfare of underaged people is a concern that keeps coming up. Whilst it feels like a bad faith argument, I think it is something that should at least be considered and it is a risk. As Liana illustrated on page 1, it was a bouncer who lost his job because it was his responsibility to keep underaged people out. This can be the risk and in a sense was his risk in choice of employment. Likewise people who selling items to people who're underaged who shouldn't also can get fined and lose their jobs. It's why retailers here in the UK are strict when it comes to ID, but there's always a way people can subvert the systems put in place and it's the person that served them that's most in trouble. Whilst it doesn't mean these places shouldn't exist, it's a risk factor, but this I think people realise and if they don't, they should.


But from a moderation perspective. When YoshiP was asked about in game brothels (specifically 'brothels' was used in the question) his big emphasis was on law and for people to report them when advertised so they could investigate them. He also gave some insight in that they have legal resources for most countries to aid their investigations. So I suspect they already have an appropriate strategy in place with dealing with these venues and really, players shouldn't be taking it into their own hands. At most they should report if they are concerned. Because ultimately if they're found of any legal wrong doing or anything that violates ToS, the GM's will take action. It could be that their strategy is to keep these advertisements open in aiding their investigation into these communities (something they wouldn't have if people kept such things to Discord communities). Or it could be they've investigated them and found no evidence of wrong doing or of there being legal issues. But ultimately, if you're worried, report it. You think somebody is doing something inappropriate, report it. Just don't submit reports maliciously (there is a penalty for that, it literally warns you when you submit a report) and don't go on and troll or attack these people in game, because harassment is against the ToS.

If somebody has violated ToS or the law then GM's ought take care of it & that's what reports are for.
If they haven't, they ought be left alone. The teams at SE decide what's appropriate and inappropriate use of their game after all.

[van_arn]

I would love to see how this plays out. we have reported botting in droves, yet they are still here.

the whole RP thing is pretty low key, yet bashed heavily. people RPing doesnt exactly break the ToS... its just as many people enjoy RP, just as many vehemently hate it. Its been this way in mmo's for a long time. As usual, the people against it try and stop the RP'ers from their playstyle.

It would be interesting to see if SE did officially say anything, simply because this isnt cheating, yet for them to punish that would be proof they condone the people who do cheat, and are determined to stamp out what people do for fun

Most aren’t bothered by roleplay, they’re bothered by public hornyposting. Merely changing words in a public ad for a brothel or similar sex service doesn’t change the fact that that sort of content shouldn’t be spamming any tab in a public channel on a teen-rated game.

Merely changing an ERP ad to an 18+ ad might obfuscate your intent enough to dodge a TOS violation, but you’re no better than a RMT seller constantly changing their phrasing to dodge a filter. Furthermore, the people tempering their language to mask adult content will dive behind anyone doing “just normal rp” at the first sign of trouble.

Since Square is terrible at moderation, being wholly and utterly incapable of keeping both groups of undesirables off pf, they should remove the player ability to set a custom message at all for pf.

That means *all* of the useless posts on pf get nuked. Sellers (erp or content), depression clubs, attention-seekers, afk clubs. Go salted earth because that’s the last resort they have available to them. What the gm team is doing (or, more accurately, what they aren’t doing) is currently useless.

The rp community will find a way to do whatever they want outside of pf. If the shout spam gets severe, then people will turn off shout and the situation will resolve itself. They’ll have to actually be social, building up networks of their own, rather than relying on five of their fc members roleplaying as knockoff trash anime waiters at Hooters posting the same blasted message on pf.

Alternatively, quadruple the blacklist so players can begin circulating a “master” list of pf spammers to effectively remove those players from the game.

The ideal solution in regards to protecting those underage would be to remove custom pf messages, but at this point I’m skeptical Square is capable of doing anything for pf spam.

[larci]

Let's all disagree to agree in our cynicism that SE and GMs will do nothing further for PF

I realised it has been a non issue that has long since blown over

[Saefinn]

snip

Your solution is to remove custom messages from the PF and for people to move their advertisements to shout chat? This will solve the issue in-as-much it allows people who don't want to see these ads to turn off shout chat.

But if anything it means these ads are /more/ publicly visible because not everybody is checking the PF as they're going into the PF usually to look for something in particular but shout chat is there for all to see and is on by default. This gives people more visibility. So your suggestion might make it better for people who don't want to see these ads and don't mind sacrificing shout chat to do it. But wouldn't it hypothetically be more visible to underaged people? So it could make it worse rather than better in this respect.


My suggestion from the other thread on the other hand was this:
- Better parental control options which are tied to the age of the user of the account
- By default all options are turned on. They can only be turned off by a parent with a pin, eg. you wouldn't be able to turn off the profanity filter without said pin.
- Add an "Adult" flag to PF groups, Fellowships, housing, apartments, rooms and Free Companies
- For somebody who is an adult they could turn on some of these filters too, so if they don't want to see anything adult they can.


This is not an idea specifically for ERP, but as others have expressed before there are conversations that happen in people's social circles, jokes they make and so on that aren't child friendly. There are some FC's out there who will turn away people who're younger than 18 because of that. It also means better transparency on communities that are meant to be teen friendly. EG: I was in a community in FFXI where the leader enforced child friendly conduct, which some people hated - it didn't mean people were lewding (because they weren't), but could get told off for certain swears or conversations. It was because there were underaged people in that community and they wanted to keep it clean.

Also consider there's a "profanity" and "offensive language" clause and refers to language appropriate for 13 and up. Given how much I see people swear in this game and use offensive language, I think there's a niche for that too as technically people can have strikes against them for this too.

This way it means:
- People don't lose their regular RP advertisements
- Raiders, dungeon runners, maps parties etc. can still put useful information in their PF entries.
- ERP venues will still continue to advertise, and people can still report them as per YoshiP's interview and GM's can still investigate as they see appropriate without them being pushed underground and do what they see fit as per the law and ToS.
- People who don't want to see ERP advertisements can block them out
- There are better tools to police underaged people away from things inappropriate for them to see.
- ERPers wanting to better police to keep their activities legal have better tools for that.
- Shout chat doesn't become a defunct space for spam.
- People who have other reasons to be adult-only communities have better options to do that.

[Themarvin]

Snap.

That wont happen ever, as in SE has never promoted this game as a Adult XXX content game, and never will, the parental control, stands by the ToS and how you read it would always been in advantage to those that can be exposed or stand victim in cases, as well as SE keeping their back clean and banning to the left and right, if it is really really needed to.

Adding extra flags and the likes, will not prevent minors access, and it is really hard to control them minors as well, even for their parents, these rules will and never can be set by the community, but the owner of the game.

The best thing is to keep it out of the game entirely and whatever you do on whatever discord is up to you, as long as you do not break the Discord ToS either, it is quite a bit strict as well if you took the time to read it.

There is already a profanity filter that is turned on by default, and if am total potty mouth or naughty mouth towards someone already, you can get reported for it, have a talk with a GM and according to how their stuff work.. longer sentense each time taken aside.

[Saefinn]

That wont happen ever, as in SE has never promoted this game as a Adult XXX content game, and never will, the parental control, stands by the ToS and how you read it would always been in advantage to those that can be exposed or stand victim in cases, as well as SE keeping their back clean and banning to the left and right, if it is really really needed to.

Adding extra flags and the likes, will not prevent minors access, and it is really hard to control them minors as well, even for their parents, these rules will and never can be set by the community, but the owner of the game.

The best thing is to keep it out of the game entirely and whatever you do on whatever discord is up to you, as long as you do not break the Discord ToS either, it is quite a bit strict as well if you took the time to read it.

There is already a profanity filter that is turned on by default, and if am total potty mouth or naughty mouth towards someone already, you can get reported for it, have a talk with a GM and according to how their stuff work.. longer sentense each time taken aside.

I know, but let's face it, people aren't going to stop doing ERP or advertising it. The GM's and devs have already decided on where that fits within the ToS and how the law fits into it. The communities have already decided how they'll police it. But if the problem for underage folk is a big concern then there are better pragmatic answers that are better than shifting the problem into shout chat, as the GM who kicked all this off suggested and as van is suggesting.

And I know FFXIV isn't promoted as an adult XXX content game, but then I would expect the only parental controls on an adult XXX game is "you can't play this". But it's a game where online interactions are a thing and despite best efforts, they can't 100% guarantee those interactions are teen friendly. So it's an answer, but still not a 100% guarantee.

Yet, at the same time, those behind the moderation of the game seem to not view it as big of an issue. With YoshiP once saying they have legal references in most countries for handling the legality of reports for adult advertisements in the PF to me indicates they have put consideration into how they are handling them, especially as they have said, if people are doing anything illegal (in context of this) then they will have action taken against them. I mean, given the whole thing was kicked off by 1 GM's mistake and the GM was able to act in such force tells me that there is something intentional in how these are being moderated and his mistake was corrected. So I am contented to leave them to it and people can report what they think is a violation.

[LianaThorne]

For starters. CHILDREN AREN'T STUPID! A child can understand that 18+ means you need to be 18 years old or older for this venue. And if they don't know they can I don't know. Ask people. I find it insulting that people are blatantly missing the point.

If you've personally never experienced a child/teenager sneaking onto websites they shouldn't be on or doing other things online/irl that they shouldn't be doing at their age (like sneaking out at night for example or sneaking onto porn sites in the middle of the night), that's awesome for you but I'm sorry, you're not the majority of people and you have an extraordinary amount of faith in them. You're correct, kids aren't "stupid" (some can be incredibly smart), but that doesn't stop kids/teens from being kids/teens and rebelling against the rules and doing what they want. I'm sure we all were there at least once in our lives. If you put a giant "DO NOT ENTER" sign on a door, it's incredibly tempting to go inside and check it out because you're being told "Sorry, no." And I'm sorry, I doubt a kid/teen will ask first before they decide to check out something that they know they shouldn't be looking at. They'll just look at it and accept responsibility for it later (or act like they didn't do anything).

I'm not sure if you're aware but an overwhelming amount of kids/teens these days are being raised by the internet and YouTube (even more so with the pandemic since parents I've even spoken to have told me that they can't stand having to deal with educating or parenting their child anymore). So, there's no one really policing the kids and teens in those households and the parents don't know what's going on until it's too late.

Take for example the growing number of cases of kids emptying out their parents bank accounts by buying things on Roblox, Fortnite, FIFA, etc without a care in the world or an understanding of how money works. There are both kids and teenagers doing this. You can't tell me that's okay and that those who are doing this have a firm understanding of the consequences of their actions. Same goes for sneaking into a bar as a teenager. They do it because they think it's cool and they don't understand that they can cost someone their job (same as me) for getting caught. They can brag to other people about it on social media (who knows, maybe even go viral recording it because apparently that's the most important thing in the world to the younger generation these days) and it fuels the "Oh hey, I'm pretty invincible" shtick that we all probably felt at least once during that age.

If you want to believe that kids are perfect angels who know that 18+ means they're not allowed to at all and all rules are meant to be followed, that's up to you. It's really not the reality though.

[Themarvin]

I know, but let's face it, people aren't going to stop doing ERP or advertising it. The GM's and devs have already decided on where that fits within the ToS and how the law fits into it. The communities have already decided how they'll police it. But if the problem for underage folk is a big concern then there are better pragmatic answers that are better than shifting the problem into shout chat, as the GM who kicked all this off suggested and as van is suggesting.

And I know FFXIV isn't promoted as an adult XXX content game, but then I would expect the only parental controls on an adult XXX game is "you can't play this". But it's a game where online interactions are a thing and despite best efforts, they can't 100% guarantee those interactions are teen friendly. So it's an answer, but still not a 100% guarantee.

Yet, at the same time, those behind the moderation of the game seem to not view it as big of an issue. With YoshiP once saying they have legal references in most countries for handling the legality of reports for adult advertisements in the PF to me indicates they have put consideration into how they are handling them, especially as they have said, if people are doing anything illegal (in context of this) then they will have action taken against them. I mean, given the whole thing was kicked off by 1 GM's mistake and the GM was able to act in such force tells me that there is something intentional in how these are being moderated and his mistake was corrected. So I am contented to leave them to it and people can report what they think is a violation.

If it is of that important to be visible about it, then there is other games that is very much designed for that content, not much point dwelling in FFXIV, and especially not if it is at risk getting the axe in the back if advertizing on a public form.

[Kaurhz]

Just rework Fellowship Finder, or have a specific section for RP, and then strictly disallow all forms of 'mature' (18+) RP in the party finder. Simples

[Themarvin]

Just rework Fellowship Finder, or have a specific section for RP, and then strictly disallow all forms of 'mature' (18+) RP in the party finder. Simples

Kids or minors range 14-17ish... would disregard.. even if fellowship thing, how would you ever as the founder/owner of that fellowship be able to find out? So there is a good reason to why SE strictly is going to fend against it for any public means on any of their platforms, and can you blame a company like SE for that, that they want to keep their back free?

If it is a must, that as a person must have something alike it form something somewhere else, with a place where you can confirm age and the likes, eg. with a video interview as requirement.