Discussion on the <Blacklist> function

[Vidu]

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There are several things wrong with this post and I'll try to adress them in a sensible order:

1) You need to stop lumping "blacklisting someone" and "removing someone from a party" together. They're not the same.
2) How does blacklisting someone create a toxic or negative enviroment? I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this, because what blacklisting is supposed to do - and does, at least to an extend - is allowing you to create a "better" enviroment for yourself, by removing people (to an extend) from it that make your experience unpleasent. Someone is using foul language? You can add them to your blacklist and you dont have to deal with that anymore, ergo your experience just got better.
3) Your whole post sounds like you want to force people to solve issues that might lead to blacklisting and/or dismissing someone. In a sense I can see that point: If I blacklist someone whos using foul language it doesnt solve the actual problem of that person using foul language. I just dont have to see it anymore. But that is actually enough. The game - or its players - arent here to "educate" other people on whats good and bad behavior that way. The game is supposed to be fun and people are here to have fun, so all thats needed are the tools to ensure that your fun isnt "harmed". Among those tools are things like blacklisting people who would harm your fun.
4) If I want to blacklist someone for cause - harrassment, for example - or want to dismiss them from a dungeon with cause - for being disruptive, for example - I dont need to show them "empathy" or consider their view of the situation. Sorry to burst your little bubble here, but I dont really care why someone felt it was okay to insult someone or that people think their 13€ a month entitle them to play however they want and dont consider that they're in a team-based-dungeon. All I need is to remove such a person from my experience.
5) Minor note, but: We do have a blacklist-feature on the forums. Its called "Ignore" here and while it doesnt prevent people from posting in threads created by you or makes you invisble to them, it does hide all posts from that person so you dont have to see them.

I know that a lot of people view MMOs not only as a game but also as some kind of social hub - and thats alright, because MMOs do provide both kinds of experience. I always felt like it was wrong to put such a strong emphasis on the social aspect, at least when it comes to modern MMOs or to a themepark MMO that offers a lot of casual content like FFXIV.
In my personal opinion this game should focus on providing a good game-experience to its playerbase, not a good social experience (I'm not saying the social experience should be bad, though). The blacklist-feature helps with providing a good game-experience by allowing you to remove people from your sight who harm that experience. The same goes for the kick-feature - if someone is disruptive to a dungeon-run the party should have the option to remove them, so they can continue to enjoy the game.

I know all of this sounds pretty cold, but my point here is that I simply dont think that we as a playerbase or SE as the developer should put effort into basically "educating" people on good (or at least appropriate) behavior. Thats something you should already bring to the table when you start playing the game or, in case of your personal skill with the game, develop while playing it.

Blacklisting and dismissing dont add to a toxic enviroment, they help you to remove toxicity from your own personal gaming experience within FFXIV. They might not solev the underlying problem of "there are jerks in the world", but they dont have to. The game doesnt have to solve that problem. All it needs to do is give you tools to keep those jerks out of your way so you can enjoy the game.
This isnt a school for good manners, its a videogame. Dont ask it to be more.

Bottomline: Blacklisting and dismissing - while being two quite different tools - arent "toxic". They're tools that help you to deal with any "toxic" (or even just unpleasent) people you encounter and rather not have to deal with.

[RoyalBeef]

There is so much toxicity. Both my savage party finder clears today, almost every party I was in, someone used some strong words.

You should be glad you can't hear my static's banter on discord. Guess we're all toxic and only pretend to be friends ^^

I was helping out a FC member in Titania normal clear today, and a vote-kick was started against one of the dps, probably for making a mistake from being new or just because someone thought the dps was low.

So you don't know the reason. You interprete the incident in a way that serves your narrative and way of thinking.

The more enacted toxicity I encounter, aka. blacklisting, kicking, vote-kicking I see

The use of "toxcity" is like the boy crying wolf at this point. People who might actually be harrassed, stalked etc ingame won't be taken serious anymore bc everyone cries "toxicity" at everything 24/7.

[ValyrianBlood]

You should be glad you can't hear my static's banter on discord. Guess we're all toxic and only pretend to be friends ^^

Come on, you know like everyone else that 'foul' language and banter between friends is not the same as with random strangers in a group. Calling your friend a noob is not the same as calling a stranger one ^^

[RoyalBeef]

Come on, you know like everyone else that 'foul' language and banter between friends is not the same as with random strangers in a group. Calling your friend a noob is not the same as calling a stranger one ^^

Of course you don't randomly insult strangers, there was no talk of insults tho, she said "strong language". I mean there's a profanity filter in the game, which is enabled by default. Why woul you even disable it if strangers dropping f-bombs or whatever triggers you?

[Erendis]

I only want to be able to enter /blist reason...

[Arillyn]

Blacklisting and kicking someone from the party are not the same thing. And I don't do either lightly, but if you (general you) are a complete jerk to someone in my party you'll get a warning first and if you keep being a jerk you will be kicked. I may or may not blacklist you depending on exactly what you were doing. So if I do blacklist you there is a definite reason. I think I've initiated maybe 1-2 kicks due to the person harassing someone in the party - all other kicks were from legit afk people who got dc and just never came back. I have maybe 5 people on my blacklist. This is all since 2.0 launched.

The word toxic keeps getting tossed around a lot and I don't think it means what some people seems to think it means. Are there toxic people in this game? Of course, it's the internet. But most people aren't toxic. But if you need to blacklist someone, that's not toxic.

[Elladie]

My blist is full but that's because I blist and report RMT on a regular basis. I think there are 3 people on my blist in 9 years of playing (since 1.0) who are there because of toxic behaviour on their part. I don't want to jump through a bunch of hoops because I don't want to listen to RMT, and if I decide I need to blist someone for toxicity, I don't want to have to jump through a bunch of hoops then either, I just want them gone because the situation has reached a point where having to deal with that person is causing genuine distress. The current blist function works exactly as it should, although I do agree that removing someone from your friends' list should remove you from theirs.

Party kicks have nothing to do with blist so not really sure why you brought that into the discussion.

[DumdogsWorld]

I think they should make an entirely separate blacklist for bots and RMT advertisers. It would be just like the normal blacklist when adding players from other servers - the results are stored on your PC instead of your account. Then, make it so that the max number of entries is customizable. Think your PC can handle a million slots? Go for it!

[SinSiew79]

After having played the game since beta, I have blisted (and later deleted) alot of RMTs over the course of the last 5 years. I see no reason to "fix" or change its function at all, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

[Raqrie_Tohka]

TL;DR For some people, if the car doesn’t perform well enough on the road, they build a better car. But I’m saying to build a better road, and a whole better traffic framework to go with it. It’s stupid when put this way, really.

If I may attempt to elaborate on why I perceive the blacklist function as not really helping:

“Competitive” atmosphere-
End-game experience is elitism rife with politics, criticality, judging, comparisons.
This is exacerbate by pressure, to do everything with absolute value and efficiency. Because this is how the game content was designed. With pressure to perform, quotas, hard grind for hard rewards. Too much of type of logic is undesirable and from this angle, much can be improved.*
Cold “end-game atmosphere”, paired with rigidity, lack of creativity, objectives-trivialisation of the designed content, results in an environment susceptible to the risk of absolute thinking, hasty attitudes, and thus toxicity.

“Institutional violence”-
It is not harsh as real institutional violence, but hear me out:
Institutional, as in “officially sanctioned action”. Systemic, part of the infrastructure. Inhumane and insensitive.
Inherent violence, as in being a nature of punishment. Players may wonder, because it is punishment, thus must have done something wrong. But what? Simply playing the game? Engaging with other players? So you see the problem now.
Furthermore, “kick”, “blacklist”, are harsh words, possibly due to a translation problem. I doubt the Japanese description of these features make it sound as physical as a kill-list.**
The end result is closed-ended logic, a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the means justify the means. It will result in what I posted before, the “give-in” mentality.

Prejudice-
I quote: “Every person has once in their life, trusted. To believe in and be prepared to devote their all to something/someone. But this point rarely results in actual finality, and more often than not life goes on. But we yearn for it, amongst many other things, and it is the ultimate goal of a game to allow us to relive, even if via an illusion, that feeling again.”
Good social atmosphere is akin to and negativity immunisation. (creativity, communication, economic prosperity and fairness, mindfulness). ***
Unfortunately, players do not trust each other. The game gleefullly provides their own NPCs for us to ‘trust’ instead. Vibrant and talented is the playerbase, but it is not integrated into the game well. Everything ‘community’ has to go through SE, while in-game mechanics are not particularly encouraging of inter-player community activity. ****
The failure to develop multiple social spheres, attempting to take everything into the game but failing (because immersion), then resulting in ‘push aside’ ways to deal with it such as ‘blacklist’.
Players wont develop a maturity without first be allowed to separate their social sphere from the in-game activity sphere. And in the impossibility of that, to separate the in-game social sphere into multiple thresholds. {*}
There has to be places, time, activities, which simply allow players to trust, or for some reprieve/partition from volatile influence. Currently this is almost nigh impossible, nigh inexistent, and not positive.

Perfection-
Continuing with the quotes, one about MMOs: “The human mind is not as adept at processing certain calculations as machines, but it excels at being simply ‘human’, providing a holistic awareness of an encompassing situation, and reacting with suitable complexity as a person. MMOs should seek to laterally engage players in all faculties of their emotional and logical minds, to let them simply ‘live’.”
An ideal game is not one which forces the player to make one cold decision after another, and every game is in the end, an RPG. Emotion, whimsical, liveliness, etc. this type of creative design the game and franchise does well, but not in a satisfactory way to invoke highest faculties, or be artistically significant. To have pillars, principles, which resonate with players and become part of the defining immersive atmosphere, part of the actual playstyle. (example, if your game’s content is about a clusterfudge of hobos going royale at each other, then that’s the level its ‘atmosphere’ will be.)
Good design in aesthetics of logic can function to naturally push players into a better social direction, but black spots will stand out more noticeably and be more impactful. One such black spot, as I perceive, is the current end-method of dealing with toxicity, almost a symbolic snapshot of everything bad,
to weigh on the mind. That’s why I describe it as “leaving a bad taste”, because few games need to encompass so much in this aspect, and have it concentrated so.

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I would like to write more on systems design, with future proofing and redundancy etc. Allowing for options almost unthinkable, like remittance. It’s all about designing logic, making systems, not individual features and mechanics.
Also more on the whimsical and artistic stuff, but maybe will (have purpose and clarity to) write someday else. Wrote way too much here.

But in the end, what has been written above I believe is a fair representation of my perspective and stance. And a bit of what I see out of this <blacklist> system, from my angle.

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*(If I may quote a recent suggestion, allowing receiving missed lockout rewards from the past week. It effectively turns the weekly lockout into a bi-weekly lockout, allowing more freedom and less pressure on players. And future possibility in new designs.)

** (Consider to change ‘vote kick’ to ‘vote dismiss’ and ‘blacklist’ to ‘block’. Or ‘ignore’. Change the perspective of the action, devolve the situational context of the action away from a hostile one.)

*** (Another recent suggestion of mine revolves around improvement of the glamour system to allow for more player creativity, fun, and less rigidity. Glamour is a large part of inter-player expression and less ‘stuck-up’ glamour is beneficial for a healthy in-game atmosphere. ‘Indirect’ methods of improvement, slipping in bits of positivity, improving the ‘infrastructure’ of the game, are equally important as direct solutions. Any problem cannot be considered in isolation from its broader context.)

**** (For instance, not much in mechanics to encourage low-organisation inter-player activity. Not even a floor-based carpet board-game furniture for FC events. No true FC activity design which actually involve FC members (airships? furniture? please) (I once suggested a botanical vaults feature, aka. tended instanced gardens).
Nothing in the game requires ‘human’ contact by principle. The raids are basically mechanical puzzles where players are chess pieces, and healers and tanks are tools, (ever wonder why so few healers), content more suited for machines than humans.

{*}(Project Titan from Blizzard as a revelation is significant, because perhaps Blizzard recognized the importance of multiple ‘social spheres’ and the affect it can have on a game. But perhaps they never fully theorized it, or failed to find a way to realistically implement it into a game. Or that the revelation itself was not significant enough on its own.)

(Some people have also posted that they don’t actually use blacklist that much, this can be interpreted in multiple ways from the function itself as being partially redundant, to most toxicity is not suitably addressable with this function or that there are more problems without the right tools.)