Integrity matters

[Sparkling_Aria]

Nobody looks at an Ultimate title or Savage weapon and think “wow, they’re good”, they wonder which plugins they used.

i do not disagree that botting isnt a problem but maybe you should try doing an extreme at least before incriminating the entire player base of cheating on content youve never done

[VeyaAkemi]

I will say that linking the ffxiv search on Twitter may not have its desired effect because it seem to be heavily influenced by your personal algo, and for me it just shows a lot of Ryne x Gaia fanart...

https://i.imgur.com/JDBWTm7.png


Don't get me wrong, most of it is very cute, and I will definitely be sharing these in the Discord servers I hang out in later, but doesn't seem particularly relevant to the matter at hand... Oh also at least one Cirina x Sadu came up, that's also very good.

[Kaurhz]

Which it honestly should be.
I can't be bothered to check what the plugin does but if it automates the tedium of crafting 500 strength potions then I can absolutely see why it exists.
Bulk HQ crafting in this game is just a massive waste of everyones' time.

It requires no thought or skill, just good gear and like two macros, but it still forces you to sit at your PC and press those macros every 30 or so seconds, for multiple hours.
Which can probably already be automated by a gaming keyboard with macro functions.

That's fair, regardless of the solution, I would rather they address it at the source than deviating to a position where we're entertaining automation/botting. Whether that is completely demolishing crafting even further, or reworking consumables into their own thing (I'd much rather they do the latter). If they were to entertain the idea of macro-chaining natively, then they may as well just fully commit and turn DoH/L content into Island Sanctuary, to be honest with you. (Well they may as well do that as is anyway).

Every tool exists for a reason, I would say that doesn't necessarily mean the tool should exist (Not saying that you are saying this), but at the end of the day 90% of the content that exists within this game does not require any thought or skill for that matter.

[Absurdity]

i do not disagree that botting isnt a problem but maybe you should try doing an extreme at least before incriminating the entire player base of cheating on content youve never done

Probably some dude's alt and therefore not a proper reflection of the content they've done.
Your point is however still valid, if you've ever done an extreme in PF you would know a vast majority of people aren't cheating, the kills aren't nearly clean enough for that to be the case.

[Arthur-Holt]

Probably some dude's alt and therefore not a proper reflection of the content they've done.
Your point is however still valid, if you've ever done an extreme in PF you would know a vast majority of people aren't cheating, the kills aren't nearly clean enough for that to be the case.

The other part of the two is mods aren't guaranteed to turn unskilled players into skilled players which could add to the confusion

[SkankyRoe]

The reason they're not playing Second Life itself is because this game is slightly less ancient, probably cheaper and doesn't require them to be creative enough to make their own content.

From what I understand SL is a glorified chatroom like IMVU, while FFXIV has actual game content to engage with.

[Aidorouge]

For the players going back to WoW, good for them. Of course people will flock to a game they've already spent time, effort, and money on, and I won't blame them. Have fun, I'd say.

It's kind of funny that they're sitting there trying to praise WoW and Blizzard as if they haven't been forever tainted by their own sexual misconduct and harassment issues. Warlords made me take a break from WoW, the stolen breast milk and "Cosby Room" (among other accusations) made me quit WoW for life.

They're trying to throw stones when the house has already shattered.
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From what I understand SL is a glorified chatroom like IMVU, while FFXIV has actual game content to engage with.

Aye, it's a large part of why I never tried out Second Life/IMVU/VR Chat/etc is because there doesn't seem to be much of a "game" to play and its just avatars yapping at each other. Not to say there's anything wrong with that if that's what people enjoy, but I don't find it personally appealing for the same reason I don't visit venues or AFK in Limsa.

I'd even go one step further and say FF14 is one of the most anti-social MMOs I've ever played, so I was honestly surprised to find out it even had an RP community, or that people decorated houses/themselves SOLELY for the sake of engaging in conversation, "WU/T" and all.

[KageTokage]

It's kind of funny that they're sitting there trying to praise WoW and Blizzard as if they haven't been forever tainted by their own sexual misconduct and harassment issues. Warlords made me take a break from WoW, the stolen breast milk and "Cosby Room" (among other accusations) made me quit WoW for life.

They're trying to throw stones when the house has already shattered.
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The difference it's XIV's community that's broadly tainted, not parts of the dev team.

You generally have to actively go out of your way to find NSFW content and scandals for other MMOs but it's just randomly turned up in my feed multiple times in XIV's case.

[Aidorouge]

The difference it's XIV's community that's broadly tainted, not parts of the dev team.

You generally have to actively go out of your way to find NSFW content and scandals for other MMOs but it's just randomly turned up in my feed multiple times in XIV's case.

Square-Enix can't really control other people's conduct beyond what gets reported though, and even then they have limits. It wouldn't be on SE to do personal criminal investigations of players, they would need to hand that off to the proper authorities, and even this CSAM ring was likely busted because of players reporting to police and not GMs. There's also the matter that this caffe_macchiato person keeps trying to frame this act of sexual criminality as proof that Final Fantasy 14 in its ENTIRETY (not just the community) is somehow enabling and encouraging said sexual crimes and the whole game and company is ruined by it.

By their own logic, they should be equally horrified by Blizzard and denounce WoW and everyone who plays it, because I assure you, there were players back then making comments IN-GAME that downplayed Blizzard's actions, on top of some good old sexism up to and including calling women "killjoys" or mocking their victimhood. This caffe_macchiato person's outrage is hypocritical at best, and disingenuous at worst, because it makes no sense for them to be outraged by FF14 while trying to prop up WoW in this context.

Even then I feel like the scale of FF14's more benign perversion in the community is over-exaggerated a bit when I only ever hear about it on the forums and see the occasional "18+" venue spam on the PF, which doesn't strike me as any louder than hearing about what people did in Goldshire back in the day. Even the infamous Balmung got a "oh, so its like Moon Guard" reaction out of me when I was first told about it because I'd already been through this.

Maybe its different for people who frequent FF14 related Twitter/Reddit/Discord (as I don't use 2 out of 3 of those things, and I'm not in any FF14 channels), but the only time I get exposed to the NSFW side of FF14 at all is when I seek it out, with regards to say... fan art & animations, or certain kinds of chat bots. But that requires ME to be the pervert, not having someone run up and start acting like one in-game.

I don't doubt SOME people are a bit too openly lewd in some spaces, or even get pushy about getting others to participate (and that warrants a report if it gets out of hand, literally send them to horny jail with a GM), but the way people talk, you'd think every world was infected with orgy pandemics in the streets of every major city. But I've even rolled through Balmung to go shopping on the MB wearing barely anything and didn't even get so much as a winky-face tell, so I just always assumed the adult elements were very roped off, and you had to actively seek them out. (Same as anyone trying to ERP in any other MMO, including WoW.)

If stuff keeps showing up in people's feeds, I would think the fault is on those platforms for pushing through things that aren't being properly filtered, and I would hope they provide ways of telling the algorithm "please don't show me this" or at the very least, let people block those who post the content. I certainly know if I was walking into Twitter everyday only to get a feed full of Roe dong swangin' around that I would be scrubbing my history to get rid of whatever made the website think I wanted to see more of that, and I would be blacklisting the people uploading it if they were deliberately mis-tagging crap to sneak it through.

[VanillaWafer]

It's kind of funny that they're sitting there trying to praise WoW and Blizzard as if they haven't been forever tainted by their own sexual misconduct and harassment issues. Warlords made me take a break from WoW, the stolen breast milk and "Cosby Room" (among other accusations) made me quit WoW for life.

They're trying to throw stones when the house has already shattered.

That Blizzard situation is a good example of why I think evidence matters. There were government investigations, lawsuits, and court-approved settlements that established a very specific set of allegations and actions.

If you personally stopped playing WoW because of Blizzard's misconduct, I get that as a personal boundary. But I'd apply the same standard to FFXIV: present the documented facts, (Not someone's Youtube video, a post on X, or a Google doc.) and let individual players decide what those facts mean for them. I don't think either situation requires everyone to reach the same conclusion.

If there's comparable evidence regarding the FFXIV allegations, I'm willing to look at it. But I'd rather distinguish documented findings from broader claims about the entire FFXIV community.

A serious criminal case should be taken seriously and reported appropriately, but that doesn't automatically establish that FFXIV or its entire community enables or encourages that behavior.

I'd also be careful about using either personal experience or social-media feeds as a measure of prevalence. Neither encountering nothing nor seeing a lot of something online necessarily tells us how widespread it actually is.