Harassment and abuse in FF14

[twynfpd]

I cannot stay silent anymore. I want to share with you all some painful experiences of interacting with certain people in this game. As per posting rules, I will omit player names and even server names.

Those people are what you can call abusive manipulators. While they play videogames, they are constantly looking for potential targets, with the intent of gaining their trust and consequently using those people for, as one of them called it, "mental abuse". There are highly dangerous people among them, who are actively trying to harm their victims, as happened with myself, acting in such a way as to conceal the intent and consequences of their influence from their target.

I know that presence of abusive and manipulative people on the internet is not news by itself. At least it shouldn't be, I know that it's easy to forget how dangerous internet really is. I've been approached and attacked by those people numerous times over the years, and as a result, learned a lot about their methods and practices. I firmly believe that everyone should be informed about such dangers.

I got into hospital after last encounter with those people this February, and I'm still recovering from it. I know that I'm not in any way special, neither the first, nor the last victim, just one of many, which was repeatedly confirmed by those people themselves. Judging by how honed their techniques are, how readily and ruthlessly do they employ them, and how convinced they are that they won't be caught or punished because "you cannot prove anything" and "noone will believe you", they've been getting away with it for a while.

I want to underline that I'm not trying to cast a shade on Square Enix in any way, I am a big fan of FF14 myself. Manipulators play a variety of videogames, MMOs just inherently present one of the more convenient spaces to scout for, and approach their victims, due to this genre's underlying social nature. I know for a fact that they have the same presence in WoW as well.

[twynfpd]

Manipulation mechanism

Manipulator tries to push their victim to exact degree the victim can bear it, without victim even noticing what is actually being done to her. Manipulators know that pushing a victim past this point will alert the victim that something is wrong, and will cause her to "wake up" to the reality of her situation and the nature of abusive relationship with the manipulator.

They keep insisting "you allowed me to do it to you because you consented to interacting with me, therefore you bear responsibility for what I did to you".

Let's start by saying the obvious, you cannot consent to something without being clearly informed in unambiguous way about what will be done to you ahead of time.

To get someone's explicit consent, you ask them clearly, for example, "I like to add milk in my coffee, are you okay with that?" and if they say "yes", you have their explicit consent. To get implicit consent, you tell them "come with me if you want coffee with milk", and if they follow you, you have their implicit consent. If you give person a cup telling them "it's coffee", they drink it, and it turns out coffee contained milk, you withdrawn vital information from them. What if they had milk allergy? You cannot tell them after the fact "you drank this milk coffee because you consented to it".

I know this sounds very obvious when you say it out loud, yet manipulators are trying to distort this concept in the mind of their victims and use it as an universal excuse to blame their victims for anything they do to them without their awareness. "You kept hanging out with me, therefore you gave me an opportunity to do this to you, therefore it's your own fault".

And you might say, if you try to take a little sip of coffee you will be instantly able to tell if it has milk in it or not. But devious manipulator can add a single drop of milk that will not trigger your taste buds. Next time you come to his house thinking him as your good friend, he will add two drops. Next day it's three. In some time, there might be a point where you start to suspect something. Maybe it's smell, maybe it's hints in the taste. Maybe you will think it's impolite to complain and keep drinking. Maybe you'll think your senses play tricks on you, because you trust your friendship this much. Maybe you'll refuse a cup the next time. That's when manipulator might say "oh I'm really sorry, it's my bad, I mixed our cups around accidentally because I drink it with milk", and will take it as a signal to go slower. Go back a few drops then start adding one more drop every two days, or every week.

In manipulator's twisted world, word "consent" means "going under the radar of victim's conscious awareness".

[twynfpd]

Now even if you hated the taste of milk before, over time you might get used to it without even realizing it. And you might eventually recognize what was happening all along without you noticing, and ask the manipulator "wait, were you adding milk to my coffee this whole time?" To which he will always reply "but you liked it, didn't you?"

Some people, might go along with it even through confusing internal conflict. If it's me, I will always consider it a breach of trust and will never look at the person the same way. Question of taste is irrelevant to me compared to the question of trust that has been violated. Manipulators try to recognize and target people who belong to the first category.

But imagine victim indeed had milk allergy. What will happen then? Victim will start noticing negative symptoms, and wondering what is going on with her health. While coming over to manipulator she still considers her friend, and drinking delicious coffee, none the wiser. She might even get into a hospital and noone will know how did milk get into her body. This is undeniably a serious and concerning situation. And it gets even worse if it turns out manipulator knew about victim's health concerns all along.

Now, you might ask, how does it all translate to videogames? You cannot give someone a cup of coffee through ethernet cable, and you cannot punch a person through TCP/IP. Surely, it means internet is completely safe? What can you actually do to a person with just text chat and fantasy RPG gameplay? It turns out, quite a lot. Pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

[twynfpd]

I don't think anyone has doubts that placebo effect is real, it's been proven by numerous studies long ago. If a respectable trustworthy doctor gives a person a pill that has no medicine it, and explains to them that it will cure them in a few weeks, certain percent of people will show measurable improvement in their physical state. It's related to psychosomatics, and people's genuine faith that their state will improve somehow activates their body's self-repair mechanisms. There are caveats, it doesn't work on anyone, and not with every illness, etc.

Same effect works the other way as well. If someone convinces a person that what they swallowed was poison, their health might get worse. Mechanism is the same, but direction is reversed. Again, it doesn't work on anyone, a victim has to be sufficiently impressionable, and manipulators are picky regarding their victims; and not with every illness, that's when manipulator tries to find out if a victim has any chronic diseases, because those ones are the easiest to amplify and worsen through psychosomatic means.

And how do you convince someone that something really bad is going to happen to their health? By slowly working this idea into their brain, day-by-day, drop-by-drop, word-by-word, embedding hints and suggestions into normal everyday conversations, yet keeping it subtle enough to not arouse suspicions. These people always work slowly and carefully to not prematurely trigger the alarm of their victim's conscious awareness.

People often repeat on the internet: "you are an adult, only you bear responsibility of what kind of people you involve yourself with". This sentence might sound true on the surface, but it implicitly takes away responsibility away from the abuser and transfers it in all entirety onto the victim.

Yes, people should watch their boundaries vigilantly. No, this doesn't take away manipulator's responsibility for finding a way to breach those boundaries without victim noticing it. And if a victim realized what's going on and called him out on it, manipulator got caught. And it's too late to trying to convince her that this is what she herself wanted to begin with. Cat is out of the bag now.

[twynfpd]

General observations about those people

Those people are very, very socially active in our game. As far as I can tell, this is not an organized group, but a number of individuals each pursuing similar ambitions, who keep personal contacts with one another, to share information about their victims, and assist one another in attacking them, in favour-for-a-favour type of way.

These people are oftentimes very outwardly friendly, and work hard to create an image of trustworthy, nice, generous and sociable person. They also have friends who are not aware of their activities, but who can still be used, for example, to testify manipulator's trustworthiness in case of someone's suspicions.

Those people are not of one mind, and some are more violent than others. Among qualities I often observed is seemingly complete lack of empathy. People of this mindset have no remorse or second thoughts about making real human being behind the monitor suffer, in one way or another. If anything, they take satisfaction in it, and are generally fascinated and excited by everything that is "wrong", "dark" or "messed up", and are acting to arrange such situations for their targets from behind the scenes, without putting themselves into danger or arousing suspicion.

Another common feature I frequently observed, while often acting in calm and calculated manner, and being outwardly friendly, emotionally they are pretty unstable, quick to anger over trivial things that happened to annoy them, and while sometimes they exhibit their furious anger explosively, they tend to contain this emotion with clenched teeth to avoid arousing suspicion, and express it in underhanded but intense ways, sometimes even after a long period of time.

[twynfpd]

It's unfortunately nearly impossible to reason with such people, I tried more times than I probably should have. They never "talk with you", only "talk into you" instead. They only listen for as much as it provides them with clues about their victim's weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

One of their favorite videogames is Undertale, where a player is encouraged to solve conflicts with words, with assumption that noone is really evil, just misunderstood. While it is a great and wholesome idea by itself, these people eagerly exploit such mentality in their victims, since subjects who share it are more willing to listen and try to accept whatever convoluted tangle of words they're told. For every thing manipulator does, there's a superficial explanation that covers up his actions. "We're just friends", "we are just playing the game", "I just wanted to give you something you didn't know you wanted", etc. Manipulators need people who are willing to give them benefit of the doubt, who is willing to believe their words more than own feelings and intuition.

Another story trope they frequently bring up and glorify is "falling in love with a villain", akin to Stockholm syndrome.

A couple of these people mentioned their grandiose delusions that they are "building an empire of mental slavery", as stupid as it sounds. They also refer to this idea of theirs using the term "worldbuilding" borrowed from fiction writing, in a distorted way.

[twynfpd]

Techniques I frequently observed

Manipulators heavily employ alternate characters and alternate accounts to approach and attack their victim from different angles.

If during an interaction with manipulator his victim started to suspect that something is off, manipulator often quickly brings up an alt account or a help of his accomplices to try and distract his victim from thoughts that manipulator deems "troubling". Victim out of the blue receives messages from several of her in-game friends that either assist manipulator, or are his own alts, who demand her immediate attention with unrelated topics. Or victim may be suddenly approached by strangers with weird, confusing, or even startling and disturbing conversations, often using convoluted phrases and a lot of misspellings to make them hard to read and understand, to mentally tire out their victim.

If you think "shouldn't those strange coincidences arouse even more suspicions from the victim?", you are correct. It has ever been a red flag for me.

If a victim recognized manipulator's intentions and blocked him, yet he is still interested in his target, he might use different character and approach her once again, making up a completely different persona, with a detailed fake backstory, likely tailored to be more appealing to the victim, and trying to be more subtle and careful this time.

[twynfpd]

There's one technique they use to monitor their victim's psychological state that I find very curious. It appears to be highly unreliable to me, but they still seem to be leaning on it regularly. Victim is explained, often in unrelated context, a "traffic light" signal system, where "green" means "I think everything is alright", "yellow" means "I feel something is off", and "red" means "I'm getting uncomfortable". It's then assumed that when presented with a choice between, let's say, a chili pepper, a banana, and a cucumber, victim will subconsciously gravitate towards the choice representing her inner state in a situation arranged by a manipulator, even if the victim is not aware that she's being asked a question, or even the fact of interacting with manipulator at all. This trick is used to measure if manipulator is free to keep pushing, or should show down to not alert victim's conscious awareness. Any objects or notions associated with colors can be employed to this end. Ruby carbuncle, topaz carbuncle, or emerald carbuncle? Player glamours in red tones, yellow-ish tones or green tones?

This is what manipulators call "communication", in their twisted terms. When they say "communication", they never mean talking honestly and openly face-to-face like two human beings, which is what "communication" actually means. Instead they mean, from one side, "extracting" information from the victim in underhanded ways, and from another side, victim accepting manipulator's convoluted explanations without any questioning or internal criticism.

If a victim doesn't pass "correct" signals in such a manner, or doesn't unquestionably accept any convoluted self-contradicting explanations of manipulator, the victim is blamed and shamed for "being bad at communication", even if she has no context of what manipulator is even talking about. You might notice that blaming their victims for manipulator's faults is a recurring theme in interaction with those people.

Knowing what I know now about "signaling", it becomes obvious why manipulator got very angry when, presented with a choice between a chili, banana and cucumber in discord chat, I chose eggplant. Manipulator was just stubborn enough and refused to admit to himself that I was never onboard about participating in his mindgames.

Any attempts to initiate an actual open conversation are usually met with "I don't know what you are talking about " followed by especially focused confusion tactics, therefore proving my suspicions that the person I'm talking to is one of the people involved in these activities.

[twynfpd]

Manipulators very frequently create a persona that is very similar and relatable to the victim in some ways. Manipulator often tries to learn about victim's preferences and feelings through covert means, without victim explicitly telling those facts about herself to him, to make it more believable. For example, if manipulator used alt character to talk to his target and learned that the victim likes oranges and rainy days, he might insert phrases "I like oranges" and "I love it when it rains" in their everyday conversations. The goal is to create as many of such little "me too" moments as he can, and eventually create a subconscious impression that the victim is talking to her mirror reflection. Then manipulator may use this effect to say things about himself that the victim is expected to unknowingly transfer upon her own person. For example, he will say "I feel so heavy and tired today", and victim might relate to this phrase by extension, and feel slightly more exhausted for the rest of the day without realizing the cause of this sudden tiredness.

Manipulators frequently prey on empathetic people because empathy is considered by them to be one of the easiest vulnerabilities to abuse.

Adjacent frequently employed tactic is talking about the victim in third-person. Manipulator can start talking about some friend he knows, and mention a few of the character traits this hypothetical friend shares with the victim, and then tell something about what said "friend" does or feels, expecting his victim to subconsciously transfer these suggestions on herself.

[twynfpd]

Manipulators persistently work to blur the boundary between real and imaginary in the mind of their victims, chiseling away at this normally impenetrable wall until it breaks, until the victim starts to struggle to see a difference between a made-up story and real life. It's easy to see why such mentality in victims is beneficial to them, but it's also incredibly dangerous all by itself: mistaking fantasy for reality borders on insanity. They very heavily employ manipulation through storytelling and roleplaying (both erotic roleplay and D&D-style roleplay), with the implication of "what happens to your character in a story, happens to you in real life".

As a specific example, when these people talk about me tanking, they mean "tanking" verbal aggression of other players. They somehow want me to believe that if I enjoy playing warrior or paladin, it implies that I "consent" to being a target of literal enmity from human beings as well.

When those people talk about "playing the game", they imply "playing mindgames and toying with your head". When I play FF14, I only want to play FF14, it doesn't mean that just by logging in, or responding to "let's play together", I somehow give anyone my consent to have my brain "twisted" by them.

Manipulators try to mix up all these meanings with intent, trying to confuse their victim, and trick her into thinking that this is indeed what she meant when she said that she likes "tanking" or "playing the game", or numerous other notions of their distorted language of double meanings.