It's almost like SE encourages stalking in this game...

[LittleImp]

Some of the tone-deaf responses making light of the issue in this thread are actually just depressing.

I have a family friend whose daughter was brutally attacked and killed by her stalker, after he successfully impersonated someone else and lured her to meet him in a public park.

I left this out of my previous posts because it was gruesome and unrelated to the game, but I can't emphasize enough how extremely serious this type of issue can be, and that you never know if someone in this thread may have been impacted by it in a very serious way. Please stop making light of it, or mocking the victims of this kind of thing.

[SaberMaxwell]

The system you're proposing would necessarily have to be an opt-out venture. If it were opt-in, you're most likely to not even know about this feature before a stalker has already latched on and gotten your lodestone ID. If the stalker also knew about this feature, they might also start grabbing the IDs of everyone you associate with. Of course, the question then becomes "What functionalities of the lodestone would change if this were to be opt-out?" For one, achievement information for aggregates and surveys would be locked away from third party sites like luckybancho, who use achievement data to track accomplishments in game, as well as population censuses that themselves are pretty popular.

Which, you might answer, is a worthy cost for online protection. I'd typically agree, however it's worth noting that I do not use lodestone much myself so I'm not aware of how the community there works (because as far as I know, there is a community of bloggers there.) I do know people who would abuse being able to hide their lodestone ID to continually harass a community by merely changing their identity every time they'd been ousted, though, so having lodestone IDs defaulted to "hidden" could be a double-edged sword.

[Reinha]

The system you're proposing would necessarily have to be an opt-out venture. If it were opt-in, you're most likely to not even know about this feature before a stalker has already latched on and gotten your lodestone ID.

If done correctly, a privacy feature could make it unnecessary to keep your ID unknown. What would a stalker need the ID for if they couldn't see anything but a blank page belonging to that ID? Maybe a gray silhouette and a message "This character's Lodestone page is set to private." If they couldn't see the name, the server or the fc, there is nothing to track someone with. I wish we could have an option to set it so that only friends could see any info about the character.

[Melorie]

I never had a problem with stalkers into this game. Nor in any other online game.
That being said, more privacy is always better, and FF14 isn't good at letting you keep your privacy.
I don't know why so many people here are trying to downplay the seriousness of the act of stalking someone, though. Just because you haven't suffered from it doesn't mean it's a minor issue that doesn't exist, and there is room to improve privacy in FFXIV regardless.

[StriderShinryu]

I've never had any experience with the situation, but this does seem very odd to me as being something that hasn't been changed. At least from my perspective the ability to hide and/or annonimize information on the lodestone does seem like something that shouldn't really be all that hard to do. As others have said, this should be something turned on by default and if you wanted to make it public you should have to opt in to doing so.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

There's a fix for the Lodestone problem:

- Make an alt
- Go to the Lodestone page
- Open "Active Character
- Switch to alt



Now the alt is visible instead of your main.
Sure, now you have an unused alt sitting in your char list, but that's better than having someone stalk you around the clock.

[Iscah]

There's a fix for the Lodestone problem:

- Make an alt
- Go to the Lodestone page
- Open "Active Character
- Switch to alt

Each character has an individual profile, whether it's your "active character" or not.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

Each character has an individual profile, whether it's your "active character" or not.

Dang, there it goes out the window
Yeah, then SE has to fix this. The only way to do something about it would be to refuse to let this thread sink to page 2.

[midnitdragoon]

This is a video game.... I don't think square will take these types of issues serious unless it gets to a point where it affects real life

[HiThere]

This is a video game.... I don't think square will take these types of issues serious unless it gets to a point where it affects real life

Well, it certainly won't be addressed unless and until people raise it with SE (which is what this thread is intended to do). There was a recent interview with Yoshi-P where they touched on issues of privacy, but the interviewer missed the opportunity to inquire about one of the most crucial elements of privacy in this game, which is why SE does not allow players to set their Lodestone character pages to private. It was a huge missed opportunity, in my opinion, and hopefully someone can raise it with SE in a similar setting in the near future.