Quote Originally Posted by HyoMinPark View Post
They also just don’t like that so many people are sanctioning the witch-hunts against streamers either. It really highlights a hypocrisy that has always been present, and really emphasizes why the “GCBTW” meme even came to be in the first place.
Bingo. This sudden crackdown isn't something Square just suddenly decided to do on their own. It's happening in response to mass-reports being made by a braying mob, a mob that is motivated far more by a pathological hatred of streamers than by any genuine desire for "law and order." If the streamers weren't using add-ons, the mob would just look for another excuse to mass-report them, or outright make shit up.

Square's policy regarding add-ons has to change. It might have been sufficient ten years ago, when nobody was playing 1.0 and streaming wasn't as big a deal as it is today. But FF14 is currently the world's most popular subscription MMO, and it has an active streamer community. "Fight Club rules" won't cut it anymore. As we've seen with this 5ch brigading, it's too easy to weaponize as a form of harassment. Especially when people in the GCBTW are defending brigading because "hurr durr they brokeded teh rulez in public."

It's fitting you mentioned "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," because that policy was dropped by the US military for the same reason Square's existing add-on policy doesn't work: it creates a functional double standard. Technically, add-ons are always against ToS, but Square can't enforce the rule against non-streamers (unless a player is stupid enough to cite DPS numbers in chat when harassing someone else), so in practice, the rule only really applies to streamers.

This double standard makes no sense. It's all the more hypocritical when people defending the brigading and the bannings are openly advocating non-enforcement of the rules against people breaking the rules in private. If they genuinely cared about the rule-breaking (spoiler alert: they don't), they'd be looking for enforcement of the rules irrespective of whether the rule-breaking happens in public or in private. If using mods is so terribad that people deserve to be banned for it, why ban only those who do so on-stream?