Something MUST be done about extreme trolling

[djsahja]

I came to FFXIV from WoW because I finally was fed up with so many things. One draw of this game was the strict ToS and the supposed positive environment.

Some of you may be aware of some recent issues on Aether involving someone trolling a few of the clubs. But this was beyond trolling. It was making very public accusations about some very, very horrible things - ALL of which are absolute violations of the ToS. In addition, these people would go to club events and constantly harass players verbally, in sexual ways, and even posing as staff and stealing millions of gil from guests.

This went on for literally weeks despite many, many, many people submitting tickets reporting these people. Nothing at all was done in the immediate situation so they would spend hours disrupting RP events, harassing people, stealing gil, etc. I am just dumbfounded. In 15 years of playing wow I never, never, never saw something like this. And it went on for literally weeks. I'm assuming they may have kept making new accounts, but I know that it took days for the GMs to even address some of the tickets our FC submitted.

I just don't understand how this can be allowed to happen. Why does the game not allow you to blacklist individuals from being in private housing? Yes, you can tell people to ignore the person, but the reputational damage from accusations and harassment is severe - especially when the accusations are so horrible and over the top. If there are 100 people in a house, just trying to tell people to blacklist the person isn't solving the problem. And then this happens night after night after night... how can SE not do anything at all to address this on a larger scale?

I'm just dumbfounded that you are unable to blacklist someone from your private house. It's either everyone or no one. I just...

To be honest, in any other situation a person would likely have a reasonable legal claim of slander based on what these people were saying. And yet, it is permitted to continue. I just can't believe this games does not have basic things in place that could prevent this until GMs are able to take action.

[SamSmoot]

Ideally, if you ignore someone, they should effectively disappear. Not seen, heard, invisible.

[Raikai]

I've seen this problem before about people griefing RP venues... It would be proper if the owner of the housing plot could block the person away from entering by putting them in the ban list.

But seriously, the whole account should be ban, as the person is much likely to grief back on an alt.

Slightly offtopic though, I would love if the banlist would literally remove people from the forums in my eyes - as in not even being able to see they posted. This would certainly alleviate the visual clutter of the troll threads here as well, and would possibly just make them disappear altogether, given that their threads wouldn't be as popular (by negative engagement).

[Rolder50]

Ideally, if you ignore someone, they should effectively disappear. Not seen, heard, invisible.

Ironically, there's a mod that does this.

[Themarvin]

So the staff require gil from the guests as well? for some vip service or whatever?

[Toukichiful]

Man the more you know.

[SannaR]

So the staff require gil from the guests as well? for some vip service or whatever?

Gil can be used to buy drinks and food. Or to gamble with. Then there are other services you can buy via Gil.

This is another thing I wish you could do with housing. I'm not sure how they would change the setting this falls under. It really kills the mood even if you're at a place to listen to the music and dance when someone feels like being a disruptive jerk. As if most clubs ran into this situation in the real world a bouncer would be able to toss them outside and they'd end up on a not allowed in list. Right now with how houses are either locked and only those who have permission to enter can do so. I.E FC mates or those you share your house with or it's everyone and anyone can just waltz in and you hope enough people have reported the trouble maker and a GM has come to deal with them or they get bored and leave. It's hard enough to get people to put their minions away since the game counts them as a person and there's a cap per house size of how many people are allowed inside a building. I'm sure there's a cap for apartments, but I've never gone to the maid cafes and the like that are run out of them. It sucks even more for when a place is so popular people can't get in and so they end up needing to entertain any guests that are outside.

[Jeeqbit]

They may not be banned for a first offense and the ban periods can be short, so it might take time for them to be stopped. Multiple accounts are a problem for SE for this reason. For most people, they are too inconvenient to bother with, but those who have bothered created the problem that each account has a fresh history and can't be banned right away.

The house owner should request them to stop and if they don't, report them, pasting the request and timestamp. You can enable timestamps to help. If they continue to enter the house after being asked to leave by the owner, they should also request an in-game restraining order.

I agree that houses should let you blacklist people. I didn't know you couldn't because I don't use houses much.

[NekoMataMata]

FFXIV has really poor controls when it comes to dealing with other players harassing you. You basically have to file out a report(which is extremely tedious and often times you get subsequent responses to your report asking you for the same information you previously sent), since there's nothing else you can do.

If you block someone you can still see them, they can still enter your house/apartment, still end up in the same party as you, and even still have you on their friends list if you had them added previously. And it doesn't help that this games community seems to have a lot of creeps in it. On another MMO I played, grooming was rampant. I don't think FFXIV has the age range for that but assuming I don't put /busy on and I socialize a little publicly, I run into just as many creeps now as I did back then.

Also, another side note but the /busy icon is so mean looking.

[djsahja]

So the staff require gil from the guests as well? for some vip service or whatever?

No, but some venues have gambling, buy drinks, etc. But in the case of the troll, they were posing as a member of the staff and then shouting that the venue was running a raffle and it was 1 million gil to buy in. While the owners of the venue did everything they could to try to let people know not to do it, there were still people that lost money.

The thing is, this was beyond normal harassment. My point is that without any additional controls, an RP venue could have their entire night ruined because it takes several days for a GM to actually investigate. I understand how the report system works and that the company line is, "blacklist the person and file a report." But when you have someone in your RP house shouting that the owner is a child molester (yes, this is actually what happened to multiple venues nonstop over several weeks), trying to tell 100 guests to blacklist the person and submit reports is not terribly effective. If the standard turnaround time for a compliant like this is several days, then SE should absolutely provide us with a way of stopping this immediately by banning someone from our house.

This is not ok and I feel that SE has an obligation to do something to allow owners of houses to prevent unwelcomed guests without locking it to everyone.

In WoW I have seen people banned very quickly for saying racist and extremely offensive things in trade chat. In extreme situations, it doesn't take days - i've seen instances where it happened within minutes. Please don't let it be true that blizzard actually does a better job of policing hate speech than SE.