Quote Originally Posted by Kakure View Post
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.
I mean, they've been pretty clear. Rules and policy don't suddenly become obsolete because they are years old. The last we heard an official answer to it was indeed three-ish years ago- until we hear otherwise, there's no reason to think the policy has changed. It's not about whether it's legal or not, it's quite simply that SE doesn't want it in their game. Their house, their rules.