It's almost like SE encourages stalking in this game...

[HiThere]

Again, I think that some of the folks on here who have never actually experienced stalking are really underestimating how easy it is to do it while not getting in trouble for doing so. If someone knows your Lodestone character ID, they can automatically know your current character name and which world you're located on. From there, they can simply log in to that world and begin looking for you (assuming that you've just done a name change; if you've changed servers, they can create a new character on that server or move their existing character there). A lot of stalkers are not afraid to expend resources to engage in such activity. They will often use one character to perform a player search once they're on the relevant world to see where you are, and then visit that zone with a different character on a separate account. When you report the stalking activity, the GMs will only look into the character that was actually doing it (as that's the only one you will be aware of to be able to report). Despite what they say in their ToS, SE likes money and won't ban someone unless there's really clear evidence of stalking, which stalkers who have even a slight amount of common sense will generally conceal. This all comes back to Lodestone profiles though - it baffles me why SE won't allow us to set these to private. If you could set it to private, you could simply do a name change (without even having to change servers) and that, in most cases, would resolve the issue (or would at least make it extremely difficult for them to find you again).

[SaberMaxwell]

The system you're proposing would necessarily have to be an opt-out venture. If it were opt-in, you're most likely to not even know about this feature before a stalker has already latched on and gotten your lodestone ID. If the stalker also knew about this feature, they might also start grabbing the IDs of everyone you associate with. Of course, the question then becomes "What functionalities of the lodestone would change if this were to be opt-out?" For one, achievement information for aggregates and surveys would be locked away from third party sites like luckybancho, who use achievement data to track accomplishments in game, as well as population censuses that themselves are pretty popular.

Which, you might answer, is a worthy cost for online protection. I'd typically agree, however it's worth noting that I do not use lodestone much myself so I'm not aware of how the community there works (because as far as I know, there is a community of bloggers there.) I do know people who would abuse being able to hide their lodestone ID to continually harass a community by merely changing their identity every time they'd been ousted, though, so having lodestone IDs defaulted to "hidden" could be a double-edged sword.

[LittleImp]

Some of the tone-deaf responses making light of the issue in this thread are actually just depressing.

I have a family friend whose daughter was brutally attacked and killed by her stalker, after he successfully impersonated someone else and lured her to meet him in a public park.

I left this out of my previous posts because it was gruesome and unrelated to the game, but I can't emphasize enough how extremely serious this type of issue can be, and that you never know if someone in this thread may have been impacted by it in a very serious way. Please stop making light of it, or mocking the victims of this kind of thing.

[Bahd_Monkey]

It's going to happen, just ignore them like they don't exist. Unless you give them a reaction, what are they going to do, follow you around?

Yes, a friend of mine was stalked by 3 characters (probably all by the same person on different accounts) and would follow her everywhere, and be incredibly crude with their emotes. She did a world transfer just to escape them, but they followed her, and she eventually quit the game because of it.

If there was a way to block players from appearing on your screen this would help a lot with the stalking issues. (As well as keeping your ID private.)

[Melorie]

I never had a problem with stalkers into this game. Nor in any other online game.
That being said, more privacy is always better, and FF14 isn't good at letting you keep your privacy.
I don't know why so many people here are trying to downplay the seriousness of the act of stalking someone, though. Just because you haven't suffered from it doesn't mean it's a minor issue that doesn't exist, and there is room to improve privacy in FFXIV regardless.

[StriderShinryu]

I've never had any experience with the situation, but this does seem very odd to me as being something that hasn't been changed. At least from my perspective the ability to hide and/or annonimize information on the lodestone does seem like something that shouldn't really be all that hard to do. As others have said, this should be something turned on by default and if you wanted to make it public you should have to opt in to doing so.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

There's a fix for the Lodestone problem:

- Make an alt
- Go to the Lodestone page
- Open "Active Character
- Switch to alt



Now the alt is visible instead of your main.
Sure, now you have an unused alt sitting in your char list, but that's better than having someone stalk you around the clock.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

...bent outta shape over privacy...

Jeez man, stop giving advice if you don't really know what you're talking about.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

It seems this stalking culture only happened on NA or EU? Because I never met one in my entire gameplay on JP, probably because they don't care about you at all.

Stalking is a huge problem here in Japan, probably more so than in the west.

[Iscah]

There's a fix for the Lodestone problem:

- Make an alt
- Go to the Lodestone page
- Open "Active Character
- Switch to alt

Each character has an individual profile, whether it's your "active character" or not.