Mod users in FFXIV are getting out of control

[Tsunenori]

Then people can't use consent as a defense for this mod. Because if it's only an "all or none" use case then you can't get consent from every single player that comes onto your screen. It's just not possible.

I just kinda wanna jump back in here super quick and address a couple of the points you've made. When I'm talking about consent in this situation I'm primarily imagining a situation where two adults are consenting to not only the type of activity they're involved in but the use of their character's image(s) in content being made publicly available online somewhere. I know you and I were talking about the shotgun-nature of mods but since I seem to be the one who dragged the word "consent" into the thread I wanted to clarify where I'm coming from when I say it.

However where we're going to have to agree to disagree is that I find it's completely hypocritical for people to tell others that they shouldn't care about how their avatar is presented, yet get angry and defensive at the thought that how they edit their character might be taken away if SE were to pursue something.

To this point, when I'm making an argument against stepping in, it's primarily because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a development perspective. As I said earlier in the thread you can just take a look at XIV's competitors to see that the battle is one you can't win without hurting a large population of your players so developers tend to pick and choose which fights to take, and that generally boils down to "are these people using this to gain a competitive advantage?" and if the answer is no then they're generally left alone. I'd love to talk in more detail as to what those steps they'd need to take actually are but I really don't think Square-Enix would appreciate me talking about how the sausage is made, so to speak, so I'm going to leave a lot of that out of the thread. It's not that you can't lock down something like this, only that doing so would be prohibitive to where their production pipeline would slow quite a bit while doing so and it's a lot of resources to spend on something other than content creation or actual anti-cheat and dealing with botters and hackers.

They could potentially scan files and processes like Blizzard's Warden does, but not only does Warden not seem to care about these kinds of mods anyway, you also open up people who use ACT or Reshade to potential scrutiny in the process. Those are easy exceptions to make, but I'm just trying to illustrate that there's more to it than them going "Let's ban those mods" and they're gone in a week as a result. Blizzard also used to include a watermark in your screenshots that could be revealed with the right tools, and that watermark contained the screenshot taker's internal Account ID (not something you could login with), as well as other non-personally identifying information. I'm not sure if they still do that, but that's one way to target players using mod content maliciously as well. This is easily circumvented by more tech-savvy users however and, between metadata and something like Warden, would also opens up another can of worms about right to anonymity and other issues and then suddenly we're talking about "Don't be evil" and backdoors and w/e else and it gets messy.

Anyway, I think the argument you're making is totally fine and makes complete sense, and there are certainly some people who are going to be more interested in being dismissive of this kind of thing than wanting to really talk about it, but whichever way you follow anyone's logic you quickly wind up in that grey area you're touching on which is why I'm trying to stay out of the moral issue and focus purely on the technical one when discussing my reasons against it.

Ultimately the point I'm making is that enforcement is nice to think about but everything requires resources. You have to develop software to do what you need and that means paying people to do it and maintain it (because it'll definitely be circumvented), and then paying people to sift through the data and paying people to action those accounts. Beyond that, you have the PR battle. You see a lot of players in this thread talking about how they would feel punished by such actions, and whether or not you feel that's a legitimate moral argument to make, it's still a practical one for the developers and the company to involve themselves with and risk alienating players through word of mouth. Any kind of large scale change to target this kind of thing is going to be picked up by the community and games press, and all it takes is one person making the inevitable comment "They're spending all this time on this when there's still botters and hackers and issues with content generation?" to ignite a PR firestorm, which will result in more articles and angry threads and etc, etc. "They're enforcing this part of the ToS but they aren't enforcing the part about parsers. Someone yelled at me about my DPS, it's hypocritical to do this one thing and not this other thing!" It's something than can spin out of control pretty fast, which is why a lot of companies don't voluntarily step into that snake-infested pit because not much good comes from it.

If Square-Enix decides the bad PR from the mods is more costly than leaving the mods alone though then they can try to wage that war as their peers have and I'd be curious to see how it goes should they decide to.

Sorry for the walls of text. I've always found this stuff super interesting and could talk about it all day, and you've been making respectful replies so I wanted to do so in-kind.

Edit: To add even more text! I'm sorry. As usual, take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt because I'm not an expert and I'm not involved in the processes I'm discussing here.

[DreadRabbit]

I’m also against the blatant fear-mongering that “anti-modders” are boasting—that people should “be careful” about the glamours they wear, that they should “be careful” when out and about. There is no need for this overt caution: the majority of modders do not care about other toons’ appearances. Aside from the fact that the modding community is probably the minority of players in this game. I’d wager that most do not know about mods, cannot use them, or don’t even care to. But they aren’t getting all up in arms because someone may see their character naked.

And I agree that going after mods as a whole isn't the answer: report the people abusing the mod. However if enough people abuse the mod that it catches attention and causes action to be made, then that's not the fault of the people who did what they're supposed to do and report/discuss people abusing said mods. A lot of the people here are putting blame on the people feeling uncomfortable, not on the people abusing the mod.

You are missing the point. The OP and people with similar stances are not simply placing an importance on their avatar, they are drawing a correlation between it and themselves.

No, only some people feel that way. People like Clover for example are well aware that their characters are just characters, yet they still feel odd that their characters are being perceived in a way that wasn't intended. And assuming that you should only care if you do think your avatar is an extension of you is kind of...weird (though I recognize that's subjective). I mean you share screenshots and proudly display your character on your forum sig, so clearly you care that somebody other than you perceives your character the way you want (perhaps because you're proud or it makes you happy). You just don't care if they're seen naked. There's a big difference between having different lines to cross than to simply state "well they're not you so you shouldn't care at all."

Most people on this forum do care how their characters are perceived to varying degrees, including in this very thread. If we didn't, we wouldn't debate over raid gear and dungeon gear designs and how they look on certain races/jobs. We wouldn't want better quality Mogstation items. We wouldn't care about character creation capabilities. Everyone could run around as bald Midlander Males and not a complaint would be seen. And there absolutely wouldn't be so many screenshot threads made precisely to share your characters with other people.

As for this mod itself, many people have stated that it's used so that you can see your s/o or be seen by your s/o. In other words: those people care if other people can see their character is naked. In other words the character isn't them, yet suddenly their reason for wanting someone else to see them in a specific way is valid while for dissenters it's not.

That's being hypocritical, and why I personally have a problem with that particular argument. If it's important to someone that someone they care about uses the mod so that their character can be seen naked, then it's just as important for people who want nothing to do with the mod to be peeved that can be seen naked regardless of what they say or do.

If there is harassement it should get reported, but at that point it hardly matters whether mods were involved or not.

Completely agree.

Sorry for the walls of text.

Please don't apologize! This post was an excellent response I'm all for big discussions like this.

I don't approve of going after mods as a whole, for many of the reasons you stated. As I've said before I do play the Sims, and absolutely can't play Sims 4 without my mods. So I 100% understand why people want them and want to defend them. Modding helps gaming. There are far too many examples where hacking and modding helped the industry evolve. Pokemon comes to mind and the discovery of hidden IVs, as well as fan translation patches of foreign games that lead to growing international audiences. The modding scene isn't inherently bad (quite the opposite!), and so I do hope that people like OP can come to realize that most people don't have ill intentions when using such mods. Nor is it even remotely fair to punish the majority because of a few bad eggs.

Anyway, I think the argument you're making is totally fine and makes complete sense, and there are certainly some people who are going to be more interested in being dismissive of this kind of thing than wanting to really talk about it, but whichever way you follow anyone's logic you quickly wind up in that grey area you're touching on which is why I'm trying to stay out of the moral issue and focus purely on the technical one when discussing my reasons against it.

Totally not a problem! I'll be the first to admit I don't quite understand the development side of this issue (though I'm sure you saw that), which is why I stuck more to discussing the other stuff. That being said I'm happy to learn, so I'm glad you did come forward with that aspect to bring a different perspective to the thread.

I've always found this stuff super interesting and could talk about it all day, and you've been making respectful replies so I wanted to do so in-kind.

I feel the same, both about this topic in general and your posts. So thank you for taking the time!