SE Please start caring about your players privacy.

[Zelda206]

Square's going full "inclusive" post-grandstanding, so that means they have to "let the light in" because the light also has feelings.
Considering the drop in numbers, I wonder if the company will even let in more bots and whales just to keep the numbers going as the games bleed players.
Theory, of course.

[ovIm]

They did address the most pressing problem. But from their wording, I was under the impression they had moved the blacklist to the server and were just telling the client "this player is blacklisted" rather than flat out sending their account information. I thought this due to the blacklist influencing the lodestone.

To code it this way was a foreseeable oversight that they should have seen. I mean this series of events would immediately be in my mind if I was coding it.

That is how I would have solved it as well. Just add a single bit to the client server communication to let the client determine if the loaded character is blocked or not, and keep the blocking logic server side. That's also much less traffic than sending a full account ID.

Makes you wonder who was the architect of that feature, and how they determined that course of action is the better one. People with knowledge about programming and IT security, like you are, would have seen the current way becoming an issue. like you did.

Some people are gonna be quick to blame third party stuff or whatever, but since SE is sending this information to every client, all you need is software that can read packets to see the account id. It's insanely lazy and flat out irresponsible they implemented it this way.

I can come up with at least one way in my head to get that information without even touching the computer the game is running on, making it completely undetectable by protection software, to be honest.

[Drimn]

Square's going full "inclusive" post-grandstanding, so that means they have to "let the light in" because the light also has feelings.
Considering the drop in numbers, I wonder if the company will even let in more bots and whales just to keep the numbers going as the games bleed players.
Theory, of course.

That's an interesting thought, use it to harvest and report every character on an RMT account. That's about the closest thing you can get to anything positive from this malware starting to make the rounds. This should be an "all hands on deck" moment for SE. Between this and so many world firsts being cheated, though, I can see them cracking down on client-side mods in a major way.

[Lilapop]

Honestly, there is absolutely no excuse for this. Don't care if it's an old system, don't care if legacy code would make it a pain, don't care if it's spaghetti...

"idc if its not possible just do it" insane take. If they physically can't do it without a major rewrite, it won't be a priority. That's how it works for anything with decade+ year old code, not just Square.

[Kaurhz]

"idc if its not possible just do it" insane take. If they physically can't do it without a major rewrite, it won't be a priority. That's how it works for anything with decade+ year old code, not just Square.

There's a difference between not possible, and just downright sloppy. This work falls into the latter, not into the former. Privacy absolutely should be a priority regardless of the system, especially in an MMO, and especially when there are genuine concerns around a system.

Square Enix isn't some random indie dev of 2 people.

[Dante131]

do you really defend sloppy coding ? lol

[NaoSen]

When it comes to privacy, if its not possible to be done properly then don't do it at all.

[sindriiisgaming]

I made another thread about this, saying that the bl system should work two ways, because:
I have had some of the worst harassment i can think of in this game, entire fcs that i left or was removed from bothering me, even years to come. tracking my location and sending them to harass my new fc until it eventually removed me. we did report it, of course we did. But never was anything done. Blacklisting only ever left ME in the dark to what they were doing. Stopped ME from being able to report it. and left ME open to More harassment because they knew i couldn't see what they were saying ( at the time i could still see the character models) Had this games blacklist and Privacy systems been more robust. i might have been able to avoid much of this harassment, especially harassment which sometimes goes over to the discord side of things, where my characters location and status were frequently leaked. THIS IS STALKING. i couldn't, i CAN'T deal with it. Its not good enough. I don't feel safe in this game. I moved servers, But they allowed server visit. So i moved datacenter.. and they allowed DC visit..

[DiaDeem]

Like the other thread suggested: Blacklist should be two-ways. You should become invisible to the other person as well.

[Rueby]

Like the other thread suggested: Blacklist should be two-ways. You should become invisible to the other person as well.

I think that's excessive actually and would be really confusing considering the current implementation, being unable to see/read someone who blacklisted me and I don't know who or why, I'd imagine it being really messy. This takes agency and puts it in someone else's hands. Sorry no, I don't need to know or care if someone blacklisted me. Affect what's on your screen. Friendlist can/should be two way because it gives away location information/online status..

It's sufficient enough that if someone blacklists/mutelists you then you can't join their PFs.