SE Please start caring about your players privacy.

[YumieYumiki]

Sorry if I misunderstood or wronged you, it wasn’t intentional. But it’s strange how I always hear, “That’s too expensive.” If it’s just for something as simple as this, you don’t need a hyper-powerful server. I work with hosting servers in my company, and I can tell you that our entry-level server, with a bunch of GB of RAM and several TBs of storage, costs about €50 a month. Are you telling me they can’t work out a contract with a hardware provider (as they’ve done in the past) to handle a system like this, maybe even with one or two smaller auxiliary systems?

A mmo is quite different workload than doing something such as hosting websites, where the workload is punctual. Small costs can add up quickly if you have to pay them on every server tick for every player.

And in fact, it's not just something you pay only once for each player. In a MMO, whenever you need to deal with a specific interaction that may occur between two characters (for example, did character A blacklist character B?), you create a situation where server CPU usage to handle a group of players in range of one another increases quadratically aka "number of players squared" (you have N players seeing one another: each player needs to perform this check for all other players, so that's N*N checks).

That's not to say that handling blacklisting on the server side would necessarily be prohibitively expensive, but I can see them being circumspect. However the fact that they went with a client-side implementation that leaks account IDs does seem to indicate that they're a bit naive when it comes to security and confidentiality.

[Mawlzy]

You didn't wrong me, it's ok.


For something like this blacklist feature, I don't imagine they would want a dedicated server with an API.

I can only speculate but I imagine what we're talking about is this. Say you're standing at Limsa Lominsa aetherite plaza. For every player at that plaza, the server would have to do a check for every other player at the plaza to see if they've been blacklisted. This has to happen extremely regularly, every second or every five seconds max, to account for the chance that you added someone present to your blacklist since the last check. Remember that each later can have 200 blacklisted players. That's a lot of checks every second. If "the server" needs to poll another dedicated server to perform those checks, that's large overhead for every call. It's probably more likely you would put the check into the same central process where "nearby players are generated", reducing the expense of it, but that means you need to upgrade each server representing a world within each data center. Effectively, upgrading existing architecture, rather than another node on the periphery.

Caveat - completely speculating as to how the servers are currently architected so all of this could be wrong. But given how often the devs cite software difficulties as an obstacle for new features, I wouldn't be surprised if the internals aren't "properly" distributed.

The frequency devs cite such difficulties is one reason for the skepticism that they're real in many instances.

[Archmortal]

And the sad reality is that it might not be fixable anymore.

Nah it's totally fixable. It's just a question of whether SE will try or not. The radio silence isn't a good look, nor is the continued advertisement of the free log-in campaign after news of this broke.

[Rehayem]

Nah it's totally fixable. It's just a question of whether SE will try or not. The radio silence isn't a good look, nor is the continued advertisement of the free log-in campaign after news of this broke.

JP thread has people expressing their frustration and anger at SE's silence, so we're basically all in the same boat.

[Dante131]

Nah it's totally fixable. It's just a question of whether SE will try or not. The radio silence isn't a good look, nor is the continued advertisement of the free log-in campaign after news of this broke.

This depends on what I’m referring to specifically, the fact that data has been collected and continues to be collected. At some point, the damage becomes irreversible because the data is already out there, and there’s nothing that can be done to undo it.

[Archmortal]

JP thread has people expressing their frustration and anger at SE's silence, so we're basically all in the same boat.

I really appreciate how much more solidarity they have with each other in their thread.

This depends on what I’m referring to specifically, the fact that data has been collected and continues to be collected. At some point, the damage becomes irreversible because the data is already out there, and there’s nothing that can be done to undo it.

Yeah, that can be fixed. Step 1 is to fix the blacklist so all this account information is properly protected. Step 2 SE just has to change the associated ID numbers on our characters/accounts so that the database is fully inaccurate. Step 3 is for anyone with concerns to do a name change (which is why I keep saying SE should provide one for each character for free after they've done as much damage control as they can), which effectively puts us back where we were before the stalkers started farming the data. Whatever's left are problems that already existed which could also be reasonably fixed if SE prioritized them.

Step 2 is the big question mark because that's the bulk of the workload. As long as those things happen in that order, this specific vector for harassment is completely eliminated. It can't undo any harassment stalkers have already inflicted in the last week, or for however long it takes before Step 2 is done, that's true. But the database itself would no longer be a threat. If SE fails to do Step 2, then we'll have lasting problems.

[Exmo]

I Step 1 is to fix the blacklist so all this account information is properly protected.

Can you explain how you would do that?

[Clockworks]

Can you explain how you would do that?

SE has people that are paid to figure that out. Or are they too much of a small indie company ? Literally every MMO has account info protected.

[Kaurhz]

Can you explain how you would do that?

Yeah, with all due respect it is on SE to figure this out, they are the ones being paid to do so. If a company of this size cannot properly protect data and leaves privacy exposed to such a degree, then frankly said company should not be anywhere near an online game, especially an MMO of this size.

If a company synonymizes Privacy concerns with "We can't do that", then it's a gigantic problem.

[Exmo]

Yeah, with all due respect it is on SE to figure this out, they are the ones being paid to do so. If a company of this size cannot properly protect data and leaves privacy exposed to such a degree, then frankly said company should not be anywhere near an online game, especially an MMO of this size.

If a company synonymizes Privacy concerns with "We can't do that", then it's a gigantic problem.

I'll wait for Archmortal's reply, thank you.