A suggestion in light of another recently banned streamer

[Risvertasashi]

I honestly can't say I have a great amount of sympathy for someone that trash talks another player on stream and likely inspires in-game harassment. For those that would criticize SE for this, I would note that other companies would also ban you (theoretical 'you') if you start trash talking their players on stream and resulting in people harassing them. Blizzard does this. DE does this. Rare does this. Etc etc.

It's not some unique SE thing.

That said, many other online games also have a built in feature to prevent exactly this. It might be called "streamer mode" or "content creator mode" or so on.

What these modes do is make it impossible to see another player's full in-game name anywhere. Yes, FF14 currently allows you to only show initials in some places. But there is not a way to totally anonymize the identities of other players.

My suggestion: Add it. Add a mode that can be turned on that completely obfuscates other players names, perhaps replacing them with random results from the name generator that exists in the character creator. I'd suggest obfuscating identities in the network data too, so names won't leak out to parsers and such.

Do this, and streamers that trash talk another player in their party won't get the community riled up in their defense, as there is no longer a risk of it resulting in in-game harassment and thus GM action.

[Nezerius]

I've never heard of games with a "streamer mode" that hides the names of other players, at least I haven't seen it in WoW, GW2, OSRS, or TERA, unless any of those have added something like that very recently.

Can you list any MMOs that do this?

Personally, I don't think they should waste resources on a mode like this. If a player gets harassed by someone, they can just report it.

[Risvertasashi]

I've never heard of games with a "streamer mode" that hides the names of other players, at least I haven't seen it in WoW, GW2, OSRS, or TERA, unless any of those have added something like that very recently.

Can you list any MMOs that do this?

Personally, I don't think they should waste resources on a mode like this. If a player gets harassed by someone, they can just report it.

It's true a lot of the old guard doesn't have it. It's more of a modern game thing, what with the rise of culture around streaming and other such creations.




From warframe and SoT, for examples. And, of course, even communications apps are joining in:

[Gula]

You can manually hide player names on screen and in chat already, I don't see any reason to make a special mode for it.

The only thing it wont hide is clicking directly on the player and opening their card.

[ItMe]

Can't you already turn other players names off?

[Dorgrin]

Streamers should behave themselves and suck it up when they decide to be obnoxious. I think SE can handle it fine.

Obfuscating character names in packets selectively would add a lot of stress onto the servers.

Streamer modes are intended to prevent potentially private information leaking to the viewers, not from preventing the streamer seeing their fellows. If they're going to be rude, none of this will stop them. And I prefer SE being able to hit them with the TOS when they bring our community down like this >/

[Maeka]

Yeah, I really don't see the point in this to be honest.

If a streamer is going to be a jerk to his fellow groupmates, it's good that we have a way to get action taken against someone like this.

If we removed that, then the jerk is going to be a jerk towards his groupmates with no way of seeking punishment against such people.

If any harassment happens, the GMs can handle it and/or the Ignore options exist. That's why I'm against any sort of censorship when it comes to the insistence of removing names from streams or screenshots, I think the whole idea is kinda stupid. Allowing more anonymity allows people to do stupid junk without any sort of repercussions so they can continue to do stupid stuff. The door can swing both ways, but when it swings the wrong way, GMs can handle it. That's literally their job and why they're there.

If you have an absolutely terrible person in your group and they make mistake after mistake after mistake on someone's stream, then maybe it's good that this person will need to improve before getting into any sort of non-Duty Finder content.

But yet, we don't want them getting harassed either, so again, if harassment starts that's when you call the GMs and let them handle it. In fact, that becomes better for the game overall when people who engage in harassment get banned, because they are probably jerks in other ways too and are better off being removed from the game.