Mod users in FFXIV are getting out of control

[HyoMinPark]

you know its a very mixed bag of people who do it for various reasons and are of VERY varying mental stability.

What? Are you for real saying that people who write erotic fiction or erotic roleplays are mentally unstable? Actually mentally unstable?

[RiyahArp]

What? Are you for real saying that people who write erotic fiction or erotic roleplays are mentally unstable? Actually mentally unstable?

Hyo...um I've known people like this. Not all of them, but there are people with serious mental issues as well as well adjusted people in the scenes. There are people who often are suffering fairly severe depression, or bipolar, or borderline, as well as healthy people too. I'm surprised this shocks you, if you are in one of those scenes you quickly find out who these people are if just to avoid them because they can ruin your life.

The weird, for me, is that nobody is seeing *you* but rather your character. The attachment to the concept of it being you is what's strange.

Idk...i mean, if someone yells at you in game, they only see your character too, it still hurts. If someone is perving on me, it's not just the character, its the player who animates them to a point. Othewise they'd just perv on npcs I think.

[HyoMinPark]

Hyo...um I've known people like this. Not all of them, but there are people with serious mental issues as well as well adjusted people in the scenes. There are people who often are suffering fairly severe depression, or bipolar, or borderline, as well as healthy people too. I'm surprised this shocks you, if you are in one of those scenes you quickly find out who these people are if just to avoid them because they can ruin your life.

I am sure that there are people like that that suffer from a variety of mental illnesses...but plenty of people in a variety of other scenes suffer from them just as much. There are people that do not write erotic fiction that may very well be as “mentally unstable” as those whom you claim do are. Your insinuation comes off to me as a blanket generalization that everyone or the majority who write erotic fiction or erotic roleplays are mentally unstable.

What shocked me was your blanket generalization. Because to me it sounded like you were saying that mental instability was directly correlated with writing erotic fiction and/or erotic roleplays. That’s what baffled me, because it sounded so incredibly prejudiced and ignorant.

I don't know about proof, but I'm not sure how you know she has none. Keep in mind there are a lot of sites for that kind of content.

I am probably not the only one in this thread that asked OP if they have ever had this specifically happen to them. Outside of the one /tell they posted (that actually occurred after this thread was created, so it was very obviously just a troll trying to bait them after reading this), they have provided no proof that this has directly affected them, that they have been directly targeted, or that it’s this widespread problem like they are attempting to make it sound like.

As for modders in general, no they don't. I thought this was specifically about one type of mod, but it seems you are thinking it is a false flag to get all mods out?

The opening post itself posts to caution players to “be careful” about the types of outfits they wear, as some of them have been modified to be more skimpy or lewd. It is not just about the nude mod, which is also not some brand new thing.

As for "you are not your character," I don't think it's that easy. If someone creeps on you online, it doesn't always make it better that it's just pixels. It also depends on the person, I mean, some people may honestly have dealt with harassment both sexual or not in their lives, and loss of control can be very bad. You're kind of handwaving it away some, in order to defend modding as a whole from being curtailed. I don't think it should be, but this specific issue is unique and can be dealt without judging all modders

I am not handwaving actual harassment; if you had read any of my previous posts in this thread, you would have seen that I advocate for them to deal with it as appropriate: report the individual, blacklist the individual, and then move on. The GMs are very good about dealing with harassment in the game, even if they cannot do anything about things like botting. What I said not to do, is paint all modders with the same brush just because one or two are being twats or acting like five-year-olds.

[Tsunenori]

Idk...i mean, if someone yells at you in game, they only see your character too, it still hurts. If someone is perving on me, it's not just the character, its the player who animates them to a point. Othewise they'd just perv on npcs I think.

I see where you're coming from here, but I think this part is just a difference of opinion or personality. A lot of players shrug getting yelled at off too since whoever it is doesn't matter to them and isn't a part of their lives, but your angle here is a fair one to take.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending taking pictures of people without their permission and posting them around and harassing them or anything like that. Even if we're going all the way down the well, and talking about NSFW content being misused in an ERP scenario, consent is still critical and the person doing something harmful to someone else is in the wrong. I just don't think targeting the mods is the issue here over targeting the people. I honestly can't imagine the people misusing this stuff are a majority within that group of players.

[JohnnyDevo]

Idk...i mean, if someone yells at you in game, they only see your character too, it still hurts.

I think the important distinction here is that the yelling is directed at the person behind the screen and not the character. The perving, however, can only ever be done to the character. No matter how many layers they peel off of your avatar, they will never ever see you naked.

And in the end? It simply means you can be as affected by it as you allow yourself to be. Just like with some stranger on the internet yelling at you. There's an identical amount of harm. There's an identical amount of ability to police it. So in the end, the only thing you can really do is choose not to let yourself be bothered, and to report those who harass you.

[RiyahArp]

I think the important distinction here is that the yelling is directed at the person behind the screen and not the character. The perving, however, can only ever be done to the character. No matter how many layers they peel off of your avatar, they will never ever see you naked..

This is true, but that doesn't mean a character that you spend years playing with, maybe building up a backstory with, or making a lot of in game memories is just this blank thing that has nothing to do with the player and cannot be violated in any form or manner. If someone instead did a mod which relied on gore and not nudity, it's still the same too, we aren't really meeting a violent death.

IDk, i guess it's just two different mindsets. I just wish people wont beat too hard on the OP for fear of their mods.

I don't have a huge opinion on either side, but I do want to ask a question as I do see this alot. What would you guys do if someone came - ingame- and stood behind or infront of your character in a pose that looks like it's humping you? Would you stand there or run off or wouldn't care? Yes it's just pixels but alot of people move cause it's abit off putting to see that. I would move myself and I don't think of the character as me either. But I'm just asking what would you do. I'm not defending op btw, just a question I thought up. As I do see alot of that ingame, hell I've seen people get as mad as to yell at the person coming up close to them.

Heh, yeah the "in my country we do not have this thing called personal space" people. Bonus points if you see them spin on their axis while they use first person view or spam emotes. I move quickly, sometimes even porting zones if its in limsa.
Oh, I move.

I know that there are skeevy and awful people out there; I also speak from experience. Here’s what I do: I just don’t let it bother me; I don’t concern myself with what people see on their screen. I also am well aware of the fact that my character is not me in real life; there is a difference in lewd tells/screens directed at my character, and lewd comments/photographs of myself in real life. If someone were to contact me with lewd /tells or sent me lewd screenshots of my character, I would just ignore them, report them if I felt like it, and blacklist them. I don’t start a crusade about it; I also don’t just assume that everyone is like that person. I’m well aware not everyone has innocent intentions, but letting a harasser have power over you—or know that they have power over you—is what lets them win. So I shrug it off.

It..well, it can be more complicated than that.

I remember times when a harasser would try to get people to actually tell the person harassed to avoid the blacklist, dragging more people into it and constantly raising the stakes and the amount of power you need to use. And a lot of people in the scene can be incredibly charming or charismatic, and then it happens and everything goes south. I think the worst experience i ever had was someone with borderline personality disorder literally turning the entire guild i was in against me and wearing people down by sheer madness. It depends on the person, but yeah, you generally are not so rational after a major issue; you simply can't be, because you know how high the stakes are sometimes. I wonder if OP has suffered anything to have this reaction. Like sometimes it can be overreaction, but sometimes sheer safety reflex.

I'm just not sure it's worth dedicating time and development resources that already seem to be spread pretty thin to a war on modding that probably won't be won anyway. You can look at other MMOs and see the fruits of that labor. I'm normally in favor of a grander cultural change around these things than targeting the tools people use, which is why I mentioned consent being key here. That takes time though. I don't know, Square-Enix will do whatever they feel is best and if the fervor around the mods is enough that they feel inclined to step in and change things then that's what'll happen.

Kind of a problem with technology I guess, it seems to amplify chaos a lot more than order. I don't think they could even address modding like that; they had a decade to do so in ffxi.

[HyoMinPark]

It..well, it can be more complicated than that.

I remember times when a harasser would try to get people to actually tell the person harassed to avoid the blacklist, dragging more people into it and constantly raising the stakes and the amount of power you need to use. And a lot of people in the scene can be incredibly charming or charismatic, and then it happens and everything goes south. I think the worst experience i ever had was someone with borderline personality disorder literally turning the entire guild i was in against me and wearing people down by sheer madness. It depends on the person, but yeah, you generally are not so rational after a major issue; you simply can't be, because you know how high the stakes are sometimes. I wonder if OP has suffered anything to have this reaction. Like sometimes it can be overreaction, but sometimes sheer safety reflex.

Immediately after a traumatic experience, no, you are usually not that rational. I speak from experience. But you gain rationality over time; you gain the ability to discern when things truly are “going south”. You cannot live in a constant fear that “[event] happened to me before; it will surely happen to me again, so I must always be on my guard” or “I met bad people before; I will surely meet them again, so I should protect myself/I should assume everyone is like that/I should trust no one”. Because, again, my main issue with the OP is that they are generalizing, and spreading fear where there is no need to spread it. The same for the individuals that got all up in arms about this on Tumblr.

I’m not saying that people should not be cautious; I am saying that they should stop letting things control them—their reactions, their behavior, the way they live. I’ve had terrible things happen to me in real-life—not in this game. I don’t let them control me because it is far too exhausting to live that way.