If I remove someone off my Friend List, it should remove me off theirs too

[Keramory]

While its an obnoxious thing to deal with and it should be taken away, a firm "shove off" goes a long way. If it gets to an issue where they're stalking you in game and actually hurting your game play experience, contact a GM.

[Merrnryn]

With the current policy, that firm "shove off" can get you warned or worse if they find it 'offensive and profane'. The policies in place right now give all the power to the abuser, I have seen this happen too many times lately.

[LianaThorne]

While its an obnoxious thing to deal with and it should be taken away, a firm "shove off" goes a long way. If it gets to an issue where they're stalking you in game and actually hurting your game play experience, contact a GM.

Right, if that actually worked I wouldn't have had to switch data centers. Some people legitimately don't take no for an answer and I hope you can understand that.

[technole]

It's a Japanese societal phenomenon as far as I can tell. That whole thing about not risking offending someone the slightest. Japanese society is full of these little "politeness" nuances that could very well sound ridiculous and just illogical to a foreigner.

Instead of bashing Yoshida (or rather the team, obviously) about the decision, it's perhaps more effective to put the effort into encouraging the dev team to recognize the cultural differences and reach an acceptable solution from there, which I'm sure they are perfectly capable of, once they realize the problem.

But ultimately it's impossible to stop stalking in this game because the game exposes your character ID in your Lodestone link, meaning the only way to truly disappear from someone's detection is to delete your character and create a new one, which will give you a new character ID. So something needs to be done about that, too, if the goal is to stop stalkers.

Yeah, part of it is culture. It's kind of like how raid finder isn't used in NA/EU compared to JP. There isn't verbal toxicity in raid parties over something mundane like there is here, they just rather be firm saying something like this content can't be cleared with the current party and just vote disband. No need to call anyone out.

To be fair it's awfully difficult to strengthen the blacklist in an MMO because everything is tied together from linkshells to duties. Like it won't prevent you from ever matching with them in DF, nor PF if you aren't the party leader. Those kind of checks are just not sustainable from a system standpoint. There is no way they would burden the duty servers to do the math of everyone's blacklists.

Friends lists don't really mean anything, you don't get additional privs being on someone's list or not, and you can always search for someone via player finder. If they are in a duty, it's not hard to be in the same link shell with someone to locate them.

[Penthea]

While its an obnoxious thing to deal with and it should be taken away, a firm "shove off" goes a long way. If it gets to an issue where they're stalking you in game and actually hurting your game play experience, contact a GM.

The problem with this is stalking can be a very difficult thing to prove.

How do you prove that someone teleported to a city just because you did? The stalker could claim it's just a coincidence. Cities are popular zones. It's especially difficult to prove if they're clever enough to mix in deliberate attempts to go to a different zone in between actual attempts to stalk you to make each teleportation look like normal activity. What if the stalker happens to have a house or apartment in the same subdivision as you? Well then it becomes much harder to prove that they're hanging around in view of your house just to intimidate you.

And given stalking is something that tends to happen over a long period of time, GMs would have to comb through teleport logs (that may no longer even exist depending on how far back they go) unless the player was meticulous in keeping track of timestamps when the stalking occurred. On top of that stalking isn't always obvious from the beginning, over time you can end up realising that player who you see a lot can't be in the same place as you so often purely by chance. So unless you suspect it early you would not document it.

Sure there could be chatlogs of you telling a person to stop following you, but this isn't proof of it happening. It's only proof that you think it is. And if they deny it that proof becomes even weaker. Players who know how hard it can be to prove that stalking is happening are not easily deterred by "a firm shove off".

[Zfz]

Indeed. Stalking is as difficult to put down in black and white in reality as it is in a virtual world. Whether one feels being stalked is intimately subjective at times, while very obvious stalkers generally can be dealt with using existing rules regarding harassment.

Honestly I agree it's a good idea to let defriending remove both ends of the friend list link. Tracking down trolls using the friend list obviously isn't what it was intended for. Ideally you should be using the black list for people like that.

A friend list connection should be premised on mutual agreement. With linkshells and now fellowships, I think it wouldn't hurt to make the friend list a much more intimate and well-controlled FFXIV social tool than it was at 2.0.