Square Enix wants you to forget that the stalking issue still isn't fixed

[Havenchild]

SE can't stop it outright, but they can not make it easier for them.

Wishful thinking but there is no "not make it easier" for them. SE didn't suddenly "activate" something that brought PlayerScope to prominence. The ENTIRE game is designed around recognition of a central ID number to your character/account. How do you think the game keeps track of your achievements, your raid progress, your friends and blacklists etc even despite changing your character name? How does your lodestone still attach to your account?

It's because the central ID number does NOT change and that is what the mods go after, which cross reference both forums and lodestone. Any encryption of said data is easily brute forced by a devs infinite time vs SE's dev limited time. There is no such thing as an arms race that SE can win here. To think such is simply delusional and unrealistic, moreso when you have the existence of Lodestone.

You can blacklist sure, but someone who is adamant on stalking can just make a new acc, and you can BL again / SE can IP ban them, and you can still circumvent that as well. It's pointless. No company has ever solved harassment 100% that didn't require national registry numbers to make accounts (ie SSN, or Korea's ID/Phone government registry confirmations)

[Alice_Rivers]

Wishful thinking but there is no "not make it easier" for them. SE didn't suddenly "activate" something that brought PlayerScope to prominence. The ENTIRE game is designed around recognition of a central ID number to your character/account. How do you think the game keeps track of your achievements, your raid progress, your friends and blacklists etc even despite changing your character name? How does your lodestone still attach to your account?

It's because the central ID number does NOT change and that is what the mods go after, which cross reference both forums and lodestone. Any encryption of said data is easily brute forced by a devs infinite time vs SE's dev limited time. There is no such thing as an arms race that SE can win here. To think such is simply delusional and unrealistic, moreso when you have the existence of Lodestone.

You can blacklist sure, but someone who is adamant on stalking can just make a new acc, and you can BL again / SE can IP ban them, and you can still circumvent that as well. It's pointless. No company has ever solved harassment 100% that didn't require national registry numbers to make accounts (ie SSN, or Korea's ID/Phone government registry confirmations)

I think most understand that it's beyond anyone's ability to prevent stalking altogether barring tracking every human's every movement, act and viewed item. However, as others have pointed out, there was no need for SE to send account information of any kind to the client. Yes determined offenders would almost certainly have found some way around that problem, but at the very least it would be making it harder and not easier.

[Kaurhz]

I think most understand that it's beyond anyone's ability to prevent stalking altogether barring tracking every human's every movement, act and viewed item. However, as others have pointed out, there was no need for SE to send account information of any kind to the client. Yes determined offenders would almost certainly have found some way around that problem, but at the very least it would be making it harder and not easier.

The only rationale they have for sharing the account ID client-side is to mitigate the server costs, and instead to offload that cost onto the client, whilst also coming at the expense of potentially making it significantly easier to stalk, harass and track other players.

It's not an impossible task, it's obviously one that comes with costs, but apparently potential player safety and privacy doesn't rank highly enough on their agenda for what constitutes a good business case.

Technical debt is always going to occur, it's just a question of which debt you want to take on, and for the case with this game, they more often than not elect to take the worst forms of technical debt, all under the guise of simplistic and cheap solutions, hence why we have a public shared accountID (Not character, mind you), and hence why they also doubled down on this solution by doing an in-house obfuscation system that was defeated by a mere spreadsheet in a couple of hours.