Integrity matters

[Aidorouge]

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.

Aye, I'm not fond of "witch hunts" either, especially when FF14 has already had a case of that which still lingers to this day where countless people believe with their whole chest that "all Lalafell players are secretly pedophiles". You can't always tell if someone taking a jab at the race is doing it for the memes, or if they're trying to attack the persons behind the avatars.

There's nothing wrong with due diligence in dealing with ACTUAL predators and criminals, if anything, NOT ENOUGH is done about them worldwide when some of them are ending up in positions of power. But the Lalafell thing is like how Twitter sees a loli post and starts saying the person who made it needs to be imprisoned and have their hard drive checked because they can't separate fiction from reality, and video gaming has already dealt with that kind of "if you do thing in fiction, you must want to do it in real life" headache back when every violent video game was being accused of being a "mass shooter simulator".

A CSAM ring being caught existing within an FF14 Discord is not indicative of anything about FF14 (or Discord), because those kinds of predators will use ANYTHING to commit their crimes and this just happened to be the MMO and chat program they chose. Assuming the accusation is proven real of course, because so far I've only seen social media posts about it and not like, actual news sites saying anything about it (and lord knows Twitter loves calling anyone a pedo as their default, knee-jerk, "I hate and want to discredit you forever" reaction).

[Turtledeluxe]

I try to stay out of these nonsensical discussions but I would just like to point out that criminals indulging in crime everywhere does not mean some places are not more alluring to criminals than others. I mean do I even need to provide evidence of this?

FFXIV is a game with employees who are furries. It's a game featuring human avatars with human emojis and voices. It has sexualized content directly in its story. It has sexualized glam. And yes, it has player made sexual content directly in and out of the game.

Stop using whataboutism or black/white reasoning. You aren't fooling anyone. Just because it doesn't consume the entire game or you have never encountered people like that doesn't mean it isn't prevalent in XIV. Its impossible to prove what the actual ratio is but its not 0, and it doesn't matter if it's higher in WoW or not ultimately.

This all comes across as needless defense of the publisher. They could do more to assuage theoretical issues with this but I would argue they don't, rather they actually make it worse. It's a strawman to make the bar "everyone who plays lalafell". I don't think anyone actually believes that and even if they did, that's a statistical impossibility no one should entertain. It's not even worth typing out. What we should be doing is admitting there is in fact this culture in XIV, and even if 99% of the time it's completely legal, it's a question of how far is too far in a social game that minors can and likely do play.

In fact, given the trend of its development, this year they were forced to raise their cero rating in Japan due to gpose. Instead of limiting the function, they opted to make it recommended for people 17 and up. But this doesn't actually prevent anyone from buying the game or playing it. It still functions as an admission, does it not?

https://novacrystallis.com/2026/03/f...on-group-pose/



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[JohnLakeside]

A CSAM ring being caught existing within an FF14 Discord is not indicative of anything about FF14 (or Discord), because those kinds of predators will use ANYTHING to commit their crimes and this just happened to be the MMO and chat program they chose. Assuming the accusation is proven real of course, because so far I've only seen social media posts about it and not like, actual news sites saying anything about it (and lord knows Twitter loves calling anyone a pedo as their default, knee-jerk, "I hate and want to discredit you forever" reaction).

Ofc it is. What are you even saying lol. Your “predators can use anything” argument doesn’t mean the environment they use is irrelevant. A crime being possible anywhere doesn’t tell you whether a particular community’s norms and social structure made it easier to operate there or go unnoticed.

Sure, one alleged ring by itself doesn’t prove that FF14 as a whole has some uniquely bad problem. But saying this could happen anywhere is not, in any way, a meaningful rebuttal to asking whether there were community specific failures that helped it happen here.

[Ankhira]

Ofc it is. What are you even saying lol.

Are you deliberately missing the point, or what? Saying a tiny group of disgusting people represents FFXIV as a whole is illogical and ignorant. By that logic, if a criminal ring uses iPhones, then Apple and every iPhone user is implicated too, right? A microscopic fraction of awful people using an MMO/Discord doesn't make it indicative of a game with millions of normal players. It’s an issue with those specific individuals.

[JohnLakeside]

Are you deliberately missing the point, or what? Saying a tiny group of disgusting people represents FFXIV as a whole is illogical and ignorant. By that logic, if a criminal ring uses iPhones, then Apple and every iPhone user is implicated too, right? A microscopic fraction of awful people using an MMO/Discord doesn't make it indicative of a game with millions of normal players. It’s an issue with those specific individuals.

You’re arguing with a claim I didn’t make. I literally said one alleged ring does not prove FF14 as a whole has some uniquely bad problem.

The question is whether the particular social environment it existed in mattered at all. That’s completely different from saying every FF14 player is implicated.

And the iPhone analogy is nonsensical. You can't just use an analogy and pretend you're saying something. An iPhone is a tool. An MMORPG community is a social ecosystem with specific norms and practices. If abuse repeatedly develops inside a particular community, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether features of that environment made it easier to organize, conceal, or ignore. Those things clearly affect how misconduct spreads or gets detected. Saying that only those individuals are guilty and saying the surrounding community structure may still be relevant are not contradictory statements. Pretending they are is just a way to avoid examining the second question.

You know what, maybe I will take it there. Are we seriously going to pretend FF14 hasn’t earned a reputation for sexual deviancy in its social scene? I’m not talking about every player obviously. But, I’m talking about the unusually visible ERP culture, e-dating, bathhouses galore, sexual mods, stalking scandals, etc etc. You simply do not see that same combination as prominently woven into the social identity of the top MMORGs today. WoW has its ERP hotspots, sure. OSRS barely has anything comparable as a serious social subculture. FF14 is different in an alarming degree, and pretending otherwise is just being disingenuous.

[Carighan]

Asking for anti cheat already turns me away. If I'd have to choose between all the things that you've listed and intrusive annoying software, I'd rather have all the things that you've listed.

That's also a fair position to take, as we know from history that:

* Anti-cheats have frequently been entryways for system exploits, as they naturally sit at Kernel-level so any bug in them circumvents all other OS security for an attacker.
* Like overwrought DRM, they degrage performance unless done extremely well, naturally they have to waste some performance on what they do.
* They frequently break, preventing play by legitimate players (see Marvel Rivals recently telling people they might get banned for launch parameters due to a bug flagging all instead of just one specific one the devs wanted to prevent usage of).

There's a reason R0/KL AC has a bad rep like Denuvo or so does. And we also know they historically do not work, so the game would be made worse for entirely no positive effect.

[Anonemoose]

He doesn't care how it works or why. These people are just on a silly witch hunt. I genuinely doubt any of these people actually play the game and just come here to troll and be weird.

I actually play the game and I do care how things work. Not everybody that disagrees with you is a troll or weird, and carelessly throwing those labels around doesn't reflect well on you.

Sometimes I wonder how many of these bad faith accounts like OP and all their little supporters like the coffee lady are bots or use LLMs to create as much divisiveness and engagement as possible.

I don't know what you're talking about buddy. I made this thread because I care about these issues and I care about this game. Not everybody who disagrees with you is a heckin evil bad faith engagement troll bot, and nobody thinks you are clever when you throw those sorts of accusations around, it sounds paranoid and crazy.

Something tells me that you aren't going to play that game where all this is implemented

What are you on about? I want this game to do and be better. I'd be more inclined to spend more money on it if they banned cheaters. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve by shifting the goalposts like this, and I'm not really interested in engaging in purity tests that you want me to fail.

[Ankhira]

You’re arguing with a claim I didn’t make.

Because you edited your comment lol. When I replied to it, it simply said what I quoted. Hope you're not a fisher main with such terrible bait.

[VanillaWafer]

Snip'd. sorry.

Agreed.

I also think it's fair to investigate whether aspects of a particular community facilitated the misconduct. That's different from assuming the game or its entire community is responsible for it. Until there's something more substantial than social-media claims, I don't think we should treat the broader conclusions as established fact.

A tiny correction, though: This incident didn't happen on Discord, but rather on Matrix. Yes, Discord often gets the blunt end on the stick because these gross servers exist there, too. Just not this time.

Speaking generally here: If someone genuinely believes FFXIV's community is fundamentally what they describe it as, they're free to decide that the game isn't for them and move on. What I don't think is fair is turning that personal judgment into a characterization of everyone who plays it.

This ultimately comes back to integrity. But integrity also means not painting millions of players with the same brush, not treating allegations as established facts, and not using the behavior of a few people to condemn everyone else. We should be able to take the problem seriously without abandoning that standard.

And with that, I think we've gotten pretty far away from what the OP was actually arguing.

At its core, the complaint isn't simply “FFXIV has bad people.” It's that the game has systemic problems with automation, cheating, achievement credibility, game design, and moderation that are undermining players' trust in the game.

Those are all things worth discussing on their own merits. If we're going to talk about the modding/sexual subculture or specific criminal allegations, I think we should keep those claims evidence-based rather than using them to characterize the entire playerbase.

Ultimately, the question OP raised is: What can Square Enix actually change to restore trust in the game's integrity without creating a different set of problems?

[JohnLakeside]

Because you edited your comment lol. When I replied to it, it simply said what I quoted. Hope you're not a fisher main with such terrible bait.

My edit was to fix grammar. You can even see that my last edit was 11:42pm, 6 minutes before you made your response. So don't imply that I edited my comment after you replied LOLOLOL. Keep up lil bro! Its tiring trying to have a good faith discussion with people who can't even be smart about being in bad faith LOL.