Is it okay to use another player's character 'fantasia' as your own without asking?

[Clover_Blake]

For the record, I don't think that character creation is that limited in this game. It's only lacking slide bars to further customize the face shape, but even in games that have them I feel that every character ends up looking the same. It's because I don't think the features that will make your character recognizable are the likes of shape of their nose (unless they have a huge, special nose), but the overal colour palette and hairstyle shape. In that sense, FFXIV is not exactly lacking: skin tone, hairstyle, hairstyle colour, highlights, eye colour, heterochromia, makeup, facial features, tattoos. Unless you have a very average character (for example, blonde female miqo'te with the most popular hairstyle), I don't think it's that easy to run into a clone.

Also, some of us can spend a long time designing a character. We also make our characters recognizable (and therefore associated to our persona) in social media like tumblr. In such cases, being cloned doesn't feel nice, and I for one have never run into a clone that was an actual and innocent coincidence. I've even seen characters in the Lodestone using the appearance AND even the name of mine.

[Sakuraluna]

For the record, I don't think that character creation is that limited in this game.

I do agree with this to an extent. CC is very limited but there are still a lot of variations with the smaller details that people don’t often notice unless they get a close-up view of your character. I think when most mention “twins” they’re just referring to random characters with the same hairstyle and base hair color, same face shape and similar skin tone. I remember seeing one of your characters cloned before, and it was to a degree with tiny details that would be a lot harder to leave to chance, so I can see where you’re coming from.

Basically it still boils down to intent, which is much more apparent when you get into cloning fine details, glamours, and character names, and even though imitation can be seen as a form of flattery, i think that if anyone goes to this kind of trouble for such an innocent reason as they “like the character’s design and aren’t that confident at designing characters themselves,” they don’t realize that it can make others feel very uncomfortable and therefore be taken as a rude gesture. Then again there’s the ones that aren’t so innocent, but they’re the reason why it makes people uncomfortable.