Ingame Stalking/Harassment versus Blacklisting: No true way to protect yourself

[Melikka]

Dear Community Team,

I was send here to the forums to address the issue of stalking/harassment in FF14 and the way the game handles a friendslists kick and blacklisting someone. One of your GMs relegated me to the forums to address it here. It took me quite some time to finally gather the courage to actually write it down here, as the harassment and stalking continues ingame up until this day (for nearly two months now and I don’t believe there will be an end to it anytime soon).

There are several issues with the way the game handles blacklisting someone.

- One sided removal of friendslist

What I painfully found out in the last weeks is that when you kick someone from your friends list, you remain on their list. They can still see your activity, where you are currently in Eorzea and what you are doing and even send you moogle mail. Me still being on his friendslist means he can watch my every move in the game. Currently, I don’t even want to port to “public” areas like the Gold Saucer for fear of running into him. After all, he can just check his friendslist to see where I am and port there. One click, and he knows.

In my opinion a friendslist kick initiated by one party should always delete your name on the other side as well. I, for my part, cannot understand why such a basic function is not available in this game.

- Blacklisting someone

Currently you can only blacklist a person, if you still have some chat messages in your log or when they are in your “contacts” aka you recently played with them.

This might of course work for the obvious creep whom you might encounter in a duty roulette, block him and forget about him.

But stalking/ harassing is a different level. Something that unfortunately often develops from a friendship that becomes obsessive. It is a process that maybe you think you can still stop, that the person will see reason. Or often you don’t even realize what is happening until it is too late.

However, why do I as a user not have the ability to manually blacklist people when I feel the need to do so? In my situation the person used moogle mail for a long time. I didn’t have any chance to blacklist him, until he finally send me a message via the /tell function. I say finally, as it was a relief to have him blacklisted. But until that point every time I logged in, I felt insecure about what new way he would find to harass me. Luckily, in my case he was “finally” dumb enough (excuse this expression) to send a tell.

- Blacklists work only per character not per account

So, now that after days of moogle mail harassment you finally blacklist a person and think you are at peace? Well, no such luck. Because the blacklist only prevents this one character from continuing to harass you.

Two times he created new alts now and bombarded me with /tells out of the blue. The only advice I got from the GMs was “continue to blacklist these characters”.

Why can’t I simply have his account blacklisted? That would also prevent him from seeking out my own alts, when I am online on an alt.

To be frank, I have never seen such a loose, unorganized system anywhere. Usually you can unfriend and block people with one button press.

FF14 offers no such tools to protect their players and make them feel safe again. I would very much like to see that in accordance with your updated, stricter TOS you also implement an easier and faster systems into the game for anyone who feels the need to unfriend or block a user. A lot of conflict could be avoided. A lot of anxiety and stress as well.

I love the game, I want to continue to enjoy it. I don’t want to be bullied away, just because one player decided to hyper fixate on me and won’t stop harassing me ingame. There has to be solution to this.

Coming here is not easy for me as this is a public platform where anyone can see and follow. I would have much rather taken this discussion to a private email or such.
Please, to the Community, do not use this thread as a discussion about stalking, the TOS or “well, you should have done this and that”. Anyone who has been in such a situation will tell you that it is not as simple.

But maybe the people who have been or still are in such a horrible situation feel encouraged to speak out on this thread as well and tell their story.

P.S. Also a big thanks to the GM Team who continue to try and support me on this topic.

[Lambdafish]

While I do agree with your points and feel like they should all be considerations for a rework, I do feel like you shouldn't simply be trying to blacklist in this case. Harassment and stalking on that level are grounds for reporting, and the devs take that kind of thing very seriously. I would file a report and tell them that you don't feel safe and actively avoid public areas. Your enjoyment of the game should not be impacted by this, and I would highly suggest escalating it as far as you can.

I hope this gets sorted for you.

[Melikka]

Trust me, I have been doing that... instead of, for example, leveling yesterday, I was writing a new report.

[Oopsy]

Harassment is never okay. People do have a different understanding of a relationship and can some times go overboard with out realizing it. There are also a large number of different personality and situations that can lead to misunderstandings. GM's can have a really hard time trying to monitor everything and have to consider all sides before handing out punishment. Maybe the GM's can help you transfer? I know there are some data server changes coming soon it may be a good chance to cut these ties?

There are some tools you can use:

/blacklist add playername@server
It is case sensitive on the server bit, but you can black list anyone. You can also use /search and select tell to get their name and replace /tell with /blacklist add to ensure there aren't any typos. Or if you are able to see them /blacklist add <t>
(they must be online when done)

There is also the option to set your status to /busy this will prevent any one from /tell you. You can still talk with friend in linkshells and fc and party chat.

Ideas where black list could improve:
-Prevent duty match-ups.
-Block Party/FC/Link Shell communications
-Addition levels to black list - Make black listed invisible/unpartible/Unable to be in same FC
-Account wide black list (carries over all your character and all their characters)
-Friend/FC/Party only chat options.

[Natama]

I am so sorry you're dealing with the same thing as me. I actually just wrote a forum post because I was told by a GM to post a suggestion (though I knew it had been posted before and got completely ignored by GMs!) They need to rework this. SE claims it is illegal to remove names from lists simply because it's considered hacking or an invasion of privacy - but where is OUR privacy? When we removed the person from our friends list, we are entitled to OUR PERSONAL PRIVACY - More so than our offenders and predators keeping tabs on us by such a flawed system.

[Melikka]

I am so sorry you're dealing with the same thing as me. I actually just wrote a forum post because I was told by a GM to post a suggestion (though I knew it had been posted before and got completely ignored by GMs!) They need to rework this. SE claims it is illegal to remove names from lists simply because it's considered hacking or an invasion of privacy - but where is OUR privacy? When we removed the person from our friends list, we are entitled to OUR PERSONAL PRIVACY - More so than our offenders and predators keeping tabs on us by such a flawed system.

Thank you for responding to my thread as well, Kitty.
And I am really sorry that you have to deal with such a situation as well.

I find it interesting that they send you over to the forums as well. I have mixed feelings about this... it seems like despite our ingame reports (and there must be countless ones from countless people about the exact same issue) they are not at all willing to solve this/ take this serious. No one from the community team commented on my thread so far, so I guess they really don't see this as an issue.

I hope that for you the situation will calm down. All the support and thoughts to you. I know how ridiculously anxious such a situation can make you.

[Natama]

Thank you for responding to my thread as well, Kitty.
And I am really sorry that you have to deal with such a situation as well.

I find it interesting that they send you over to the forums as well. I have mixed feelings about this... it seems like despite our ingame reports (and there must be countless ones from countless people about the exact same issue) they are not at all willing to solve this/ take this serious. No one from the community team commented on my thread so far, so I guess they really don't see this as an issue.

I hope that for you the situation will calm down. All the support and thoughts to you. I know how ridiculously anxious such a situation can make you.

I've actually had to make a new character just to find some form of peace of mind because the person continues to stalk me and keep tabs on me. I shouldn't have to feel this way honestly and no one ever should. I wish they'd take harassment like this seriously. Sadly - The person in my situation has had several reports on them by various people on my server and yet nothing has been done. In fact, my FC who had kicked him and told him not to come around due to harassment ended up being told by a GM "Go inside of your FC house and lock the doors to avoid him." How is this.... Correct? Why should we feel unsafe because he's stalking people but yet nothing has been done. This person is blacklisted from SEVERAL FC's because of his actions and how he acts and clings to women in particular. But we are the ones who should make accommodations for that person and go out of our way to make sure that our predators feelings aren't hurt in any manner, while we have panic attacks and eventually leave the game. This person actually made 3 females leave the game for good due to his actions and nothing being done about the reports - and I might be the next if it continues. It's really REALLY sad. And the GM's have done nothing but promise they will look into it seriously while also shoving me to the forums to make an obligatory post that will go completely unseen and unanswered because our feelings simply don't matter as much as the predators do.

[KageTokage]

This is literally the only MMO I've played where friend lists work in such a flawed manner.

It's also a joke that they're just telling people to blacklist harassing alt accounts when they have means to trace and ban people who do such things.

[TalosEscher]

^this, fix it immediately SE

[DarkMasamune]

I am sorry you are going throught this, plus the worst here is that you can't just change server to escape this with the World Visit system, and going on another Data Server would make you leave your friends/FC behind so, not a good idea either.

I wasn't harassed, but thanks to something bad happening, there is one person I wanted to escape from, too. Everytime I would go on a duty, I was afraid I'd end up with them (especially in 24-man raids or Eureka).
I was angry too that the blacklist was so flawed. It only does so you cannot see what that person says in chat— pretty useless imo.

But when you think about it, if you blacklist someone and that makes it so they can't get in a random roulette with you, imagine if you blacklist a lot of people, like a full blacklist (lets just exaggerate for the sake of the exemple) and all these people cannot get with you in a duty. You, and they, would have longer queues, especially if you and/or they are in a group. If that person goes in Orbonne, you won't be able to go in THAT particular Orbonne because that person would be in your blacklist.

I know, its no big deal for one person (and its more of a problem if you play DPS because of the queues), and to be honest, I would much rather have it so blacklisting someone would do this, but my guess is this is why Square Enix did the blacklist that way.

Nonetheless, I pray for you to get out of this situation...