Roleplay Party Finder Account Suspensions

[Kakure]

Less than a year ago Square-Enix clarified its prohibited activities document, and it explicitly includes a definition of ERP that puts your venue far in excess of what the prohibition allows. Furthermore, SE reserves the right to take action against people based on the content of their website.

Harassment, Obscene/Indecent Expression, section 3, paragraph 4 states:

"Please note that Square Enix may issue a penalty at its discretion even if a report has not been filed but the act was found being conducted in public areas such as Say and Shout, search comments, Party Finder, on online video/streaming services, if the behavior is found to violate real world laws, or if it may be considered a problem based on the game's entertainment board ratings."

That does not say you can be sanctioned for the content of your website.

Sharing an in-game link to your website is probably a different story, and perhaps that is what you meant. Either way, this snippet from the Prohibited Activities webpage doesn’t really have anything to say about the matter.

Let’s break this down, starting with the rules governing “obscene/indecent expression” broadly. This is from the top of the same section:

In general, all expressions of an obscene/indecent nature are prohibited. If a report has been filed and the prohibited activity is confirmed, a penalty will be issued…

Note that obscene/indecent expressions can range from relatively mild to severe, and some of the relatively mild expressions may be tolerated among friends. Therefore, in a private environment where only friends are present, whether it is tolerated or not, a case will be judged on whether or not a report was made…

So the general rule is that “obscene/indecent expressions” are kind of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” thing. They aren’t formally allowed, but the GMs won’t get involved so long as they take place in private, everyone present is okay with it, and no one files a report.

The sentence about a case being judged “on whether a report was made” “whether [the behavior in question] is tolerated or not” covers second-hand reports – if your FC is making crude and hurtful jokes about an absent member and it gets back to them, they can report the incident even if no one present had a problem with it.

Now let’s look to the part of the Prohibited Activities page in question. This comes from the very bottom of the same section:

Please note that Square Enix may issue a penalty at its discretion even if a report has not been filed but the act was found being conducted in public areas such as Say and Shout, search comments, Party Finder, o[r] online video/streaming services, if the behavior is found to violate real world laws, or if it may be considered a problem based on the game's entertainment board ratings.

This whole paragraph is a caveat to the general rule established above. It is the exception to the exception. “Obscene and indecent expressions” are broadly prohibited, BUT the prohibition will not be enforced if everyone present tolerates it and no one files a report (the exception) EXCEPT for the cases outlined here (the exception to the exception).

It is not intended to clarify what counts as “obscene or indecent expression” or why. It simply lays out the cases in which a GM might investigate and sanction behavior without a report being filed. There is similar boilerplate at the bottom of some of the other sections.

(Continued…)

[Kakure]

Let’s break this part down by clause.

Square Enix may issue a penalty at its discretion even if a report has not been filed:

(a) If the act was found to be conducted in public areas such as Say and Shout, search comments, Party Finder, or online video/streaming services
(b) If the behavior is found to violate real world laws
(c) If it may be considered a problem based on the game’s entertainment board ratings

Clause (b) is likely an oblique reference to child pornography or predation while (c) is a general assertion of privilege. They describe conditions in which in-game behavior becomes actionable even if no one present objects to it or files a report. Neither (b) nor (c) says anything to suggest that they are referring to player conduct outside the game, nor to indicate that they modify the domain of player activity covered by the User Agreement.

Clause (a) is the strongest point in favor of the idea that you could be punished for the content of your website, as the inclusion of video/streaming services opens the door to a kind of gauzy, hand-wavey reading of the term “public areas” that includes public spaces outside the game. Streaming is a unique case though, different from other out-of-game conduct in two extraordinarily important ways, and that reading has some pretty absurd implications.

First, streaming is categorically different from other outside activity because it is an extension of gameplay and not wholly external to it. If you choose to broadcast your gameplay, the things you say while broadcasting yourself playing the game are apparently held to the same standards as in-game chat. (I had no notion that was the case, but it seems to be what this is saying.) That is vastly different than punishing someone for something they wrote on Reddit, separate and apart from their time in the game. It’s the difference between your boss monitoring you while you work remotely and your boss monitoring you on vacation.

Second, streaming is unique because a streamer’s identity is verifiable. The GMs can see your character name and server displayed on the screen. They can match your on-screen activities to the game logs. They know you aren’t being set up or wrongly punished for something someone else said or did.

I cannot say with certainty that Square Enix draws the same hard distinction between streaming/gameplay recordings and other types of out-of-game activity, but it tracks with what has been said in this thread as well as what I have heard incidentally over the years – while there have apparently been instances where people were punished for something that happened on a stream, GMs are generally powerless to act when players break the rules outside of the game.

This is also the most sensible reading of the term “public areas.” If you take the inclusion of “online video/streaming services” in clause (a) to suggest that “acts found to be conducted in public areas” means not just public-facing communication attendant to gameplay but to all public-facing speech linked in any way to your in-game characters at any time or place, it would turn the game’s Terms of Use into an internet-spanning code of conduct that constrains your expression in any public place. It would mean that posting my character information on Twitter for an official contest or promotion would open me up to in-game sanctions if I used profanity or insulted people on the same account. That’s a pretty bonkers way to read this and I just cannot imagine that’s what they are asserting.

If anyone wants to point me to another place where it says you can be punished in-game for stuff you post on your website, I would be happy to entertain it. This is not that.

Now sharing an in-game link to your website is a different question. That seems like the probable reason for these suspensions, but nothing here explicitly provides for that either. I am certainly not saying GMs don’t suspend people for the content of their carrd pages or in-game links to them – as you pointed out, players have been sanctioned for even naming adult websites in their search info. I am just saying that Section 3 of the User Agreement (the section these players were accused of violating) and the Prohibited Activities webpage (an in-depth explainer of Section 3) don’t say anything about outside content or links to outside content one way of the other.

[Kakure]

It makes sense that GMs might hold you accountable for outside content if you share a link to it inside the game, but without concrete guidance that seems like a REALLY slippery slope.

• What if my search comment contains a link to my Twitch page where I also stream games with mature themes? What if I use profanity and shout insults at people while playing other games?
  
  
• What if I share a Party Finder link to a community Discord server where people use profanity and tell coarse, sexually explicit jokes? If a new person joins and gets offended, am I held responsible for all the content on the server? If linking to an explicit carrd page is actionable, it would stand to reason that linking to an offending public Discord server would be as well, no?
  
  
• What if my search comment includes a link to an innocuous social media profile but that site contains a link to my personal cam page?
  
  
• What if I share a link to my free company’s carrd page and someone else’s profile has a link to adult content?
  
  
• If I share an imgur link in Party Finder (like a list of bound furniture items and prices) am I responsible for all the other images that pop up in someone’s imgur feed?

These aren’t crazy scenarios. If the GMs employ some kind of pass-through standard where you are held responsible for all the content on the other end of a link just as if you had pasted that content directly into the game, the implications are pretty far-reaching.

It is sensible and entirely reasonable to have some standard for what you can and cannot share links to. NOT doing that blows an enormous loophole in the rules and invites awful player behavior. But I’m not really comfortable with the idea of GMs declaring violations of fuzzy, deliberately malleable categories of behavior (“profanity and offensive language,” in the present case) on the basis of unstated rules, wielding what appears from the outside to be vast personal discretion in deciding how and when those unstated rules are applied.

[Floortank]

The guy got suspended for the reasons I discussed. I strongly do not advise you to test your assertions by placing the url to 18+ content in your search or PF info. You may never hear from a GM, but you would only be one report away from it happening.

EDIT: Also, thanks for being the perfect example of why it isn't ever in a corporation's interest to enter into a debate with a customer.

EDIT II: Also it's insane that you believe the "such as" example, which outlines online streaming and video, somehow excludes other external websites like carrd, refsheet, or the website which shall remain unnamed. What's your logic for that? That SE just irrationally hates recorded evidence? Hilarious.

[Lunalepsy]

Another page, another discussion!

[Kakure]

Press: What is your official stance on player-run “brothels,” wherein two consenting players have cybersex in exchange for in-game currency? [This was a contentious question, and one that Yoshida seemed blindsided by. -Ed]

Yoshida: First of all, there is a user agreement that all players have to agree to before they can even start playing Final Fantasy XIV. Within that user agreement is a clause that prohibits any unacceptable conduct to this end, including behavior that infringes upon laws. Any players who violate those rules will be punished by banning or other penalties. This applies no matter which end of the exchange a player is on. Everyone who plays Final Fantasy XIV is subject to investigation for violating the terms of service, period. Because Final Fantasy XIV is a worldwide game, there is the potential for players from many different regions to interact with one another, and we have legal support available to assist us in investigations to this end in many countries. If you see someone engaging in this type of behavior, we ask you to report it.

Okay, let’s talk about this.

This interview was THREE AND A HALF YEARS AGO. The page on Prohibited Activities was updated less than three months ago.

They have had two entire expansion cycles since Yoshi learned about FFXIV brothels and stammered through a liability-shielding answer to a radically misleading question (cybersex is decidedly different from fictional roleplay and he addresses it as a matter with potential legal ramifications rather than what is really at issue: imaginary fictional-character prostitution, something that is universally not a crime alongside other imaginary non-crimes like pretend fictional-character blackmail, make-believe tax evasion, and imaginary jaywalking). If that answer does reflect Square Enix’s stance, then as well as now, they have done an astonishingly awful job of communicating and enforcing it these past three-odd years.

I have no idea what the official stance is or what it is supposed to be. What I do know is that there are formal rules specifying what you can and cannot do in the game and there’s no section for random stuff the director said one time in an interview no one read.

Players should only ever be sanctioned for violating clearly written and publicly posted rules. Full stop. This thread started because people who believed they were acting within the rules were suspended and denied any explanation of what they did wrong. If that is happening and the best anyone can come up with is to dig up a before-times interview with Yoshi-P… I mean, that’s kind of a problem. You see why that’s a problem, right? I guess it is kind of helpful to have a sense of where his head was the first time he heard there were brothels in the game, but if GMs are actually acting on guidance that players have to puzzle out by crowdsourcing FFXIV apocrypha it should probably concern you no matter what your view on roleplay brothels.

[Shibi]

Part of it is likely an overlap with the proper use of the term Cybersex Trafficing. It usually carries the meaning of steamed webcam sex, and is illegal in the Philippines with gaol and/or up to a million peso fine (c 20,000 USD).

Not sure why the interviewer used that word when translation and many meanings would confuse it, but I can imagine what Yoshi thought as he was told of it. "Ah ummm, wth players are using the game to set up illegal streaming webcam porn?"

[Kakure]

The guy got suspended for the reasons I discussed. I strongly do not advise you to test your assertions by placing the url to 18+ content in your search or PF info. You may never hear from a GM, but you would only be one report away from it happening.

EDIT: Also, thanks for being the perfect example of why it isn't ever in a corporation's interest to enter into a debate with a customer.

As a practical matter, I agree that it is wise to use discretion if you think you’re doing anything that might brush up against the rules. There’s quite a bit of fuzziness to the rules governing player behavior and GMs appear to have a huge amount of latitude in applying them. I also genuinely appreciate the effort that you and others in this thread have made to suss out what happened and why.

That said, this thread seems have coalesced around the narrative that the Terms of Use prohibit ERP/brothels/public references to roleplay sex or sex-adjacent RP, that Square Enix clearly reserves the right to punish you for the pictures on your website, that the people who were suspended pretty much had it coming, and that the reasoning behind these suspensions is now known and obvious to everyone.

I disagree with every single one of those points.

I am not writing here to argue with the corporation and I have no illusions that anyone at Square Enix cares about anything I say. I do not believe for one moment that something I write in a forum post is going to have any concrete impact on the way they run their game or the way the GMs handle cases. But we, as players, need to know how to avoid running afoul of the rules and despite your assertion to just know what happened I would like to see solid arguments.

What makes you think they were suspended for the pictures on their website? It's certainly not anything in that snippet from the Prohibited Activities page you linked. Is the violation in linking to the website in-game? Exactly what content is against the rules? Is it the explicit pictures? If they took down the pictures would they be okay? Is it any mention of ERP? Is ERP okay but not transactionally? Is it, as some have suggested, that marking your establishment 18+ identifies you as being engaged in prohibited conduct? Is it even specific conduct that is being punished or something more vague, a GM's sense that something is broadly "indecent"?

These distinctions matter. You advise people to be discreet about things like this, but it is a lot easier to do that if you have a sense of where the lines are and exactly what behaviors might get you in trouble.

When I look over this thread, I see suspensions being doled out to players who genuinely thought they were acting within the rules, in a break from the way GMs have previously enforced the same guidelines and without so much as a cursory explanation of what exactly they did wrong or how they could avoid committing the same violation in the future. I see a bunch of ill-defined terminology and fuzzy guidelines that wink at certain kinds of behavior without formally condoning them, leaving players to guess at how far they can go and stay on the right side of the rules, then punishing them without transparency or forward-looking guidance when they cross that line.

I am not saying the GMs erred in their decision or that these suspensions were without warrant. I am saying that rules should be clear, publicly available, and enforced evenly and with transparency, and based on everything that has been said here and all the rules I read through this morning it does not look like that is what's happening here.

I was not singling you out to attack you. I addressed my response to you because you made the only cogent (if totally wrong) argument in favor of understanding the rules to say something about out-of-game content. I don't know how to respond to someone who just says "read the ToS" because they aren't making an argument. They're just gesturing vaguely to a document whose meaning they probably more or less guessed at based on what they want to believe it says.

EDIT II: Also it's insane that you believe the "such as" example, which outlines online streaming and video, somehow excludes other external websites like carrd, refsheet, or the website which shall remain unnamed. What's your logic for that? That SE just irrationally hates recorded evidence? Hilarious.

I spent fifteen minutes typing that up already. I outlined two reasons why streaming is categorically different than other types of out-of-game activity, pointed out that this distinction tracks with literally everything I have ever heard about policy enforcement in this game, and I pointed out the utterly ridiculous implications of treating that phrase as an indication that Square Enix intends to claim an all-purpose right to surveil you in any public space and punish you inside the game for things you do on social media or discussion boards or anywhere else in the big wide interweb. You are more than welcome to go back and read the whole thing.

[Kakure]

Part of it is likely an overlap with the proper use of the term Cybersex Trafficing. It usually carries the meaning of steamed webcam sex, and is illegal in the Philippines with gaol and/or up to a million peso fine (c 20,000 USD).

Not sure why the interviewer used that word when translation and many meanings would confuse it, but I can imagine what Yoshi thought as he was told of it. "Ah ummm, wth players are using the game to set up illegal streaming webcam porn?"

Yeah. I totally get why he would be incredibly cautious about anything that might sound like it bumps up against real world cybersex and not, you know, telling a story about a fictional character.

[van_arn]

I’ll give it to the various escort services throughout the game; they’re certainly passionate about what they do.