Friendslist and Blacklist needs fixing

[EnigmaticDodo]

Personal experience I had; Removed someone from my friendslist who ended up being... yeah. I didn't wish to interact with them anymore, but they were still able to teleport to my estate because....?

The system DOES need an overhaul of some kind. Need to have people pester SQ - maybe on a live stream? Find places you're able to submit questions and put it in? Social Media? etc.

I just suggest all of these different avenues because, supposedly, they don't listen to the western audience/these forums, even though, you know, WaNtInG tO APpEaL tO tHEm in their most recent shareholder meeting, but I digress lmfao

ᶜʸᵃ ˡᵃᵗᵉʳ, ᵇᵘᶜᵏᵒᵎ

[Bobby66]

As an ugly and unloved person harassment seems like a first world issue to me, not worth the investment just become less desirable and no one will harasses you 5head.

[NekoMataMata]

Additional info:
If you were Eternal bonded with someone and you rescind the bond, It only does it for your end. Their ring will still work to teleport to you. This is unacceptable regardless of what mindset Yoshi P has. This has to be changed.

Just for future reference but if I EB someone, then move different servers, that completely breaks the bond right? The ring shouldn't work anymore at that point right?

Not that you should have to go that far but I'm just checking to make sure it does work.

[LianaThorne]

Just for future reference but if I EB someone, then move different servers, that completely breaks the bond right? The ring shouldn't work anymore at that point right?

Not that you should have to go that far but I'm just checking to make sure it does work.

If you transfer servers or DCs it will break it, yes. Otherwise, no.

[LianaThorne]

Personal experience I had; Removed someone from my friendslist who ended up being... yeah. I didn't wish to interact with them anymore, but they were still able to teleport to my estate because....?

The system DOES need an overhaul of some kind. Need to have people pester SQ - maybe on a live stream? Find places you're able to submit questions and put it in? Social Media? etc.

I just suggest all of these different avenues because, supposedly, they don't listen to the western audience/these forums, even though, you know, WaNtInG tO APpEaL tO tHEm in their most recent shareholder meeting, but I digress lmfao

ᶜʸᵃ ˡᵃᵗᵉʳ, ᵇᵘᶜᵏᵒᵎ

Here's the issue with the housing thing because even if they remove the ability to teleport to your FC or whatever, nothing is stopping the person from simply walking to your ward and to your front door. I don't think a fix for that is even possible because of how the neighborhoods are set up. Ultimately if Square isn't going to fix their friends list/black list faults then they need to have better access to GMs to handle issues. I was able to get my own stalker situation sorted by them but I know many don't get that same option.

[Lunalepsy]

On mobile so forgive the formatting and errors.

I believe the blacklist and friends list needs to be looked at asap. As they stand, they open up people to being stalked and put more power into those would-be abusers.

If you are mutual friends with someone and you suffered abuse from them, as soon as you unfriend and blacklist them, you haven given them a ton of power over you. Whenever you unfriendly someone, it only does it for your side. You will still be on their friends list until they remove you. The only thing the blacklist does is the following:
Sending tells
Teleporting to your house/apartment/FC(From your menu)
Joining your PF
Trading
Inspecting your adventure plate

Things unconfirmed, but possible:
Porting to your house/fc if you use someone else's port list


Here is what they can do(if prior friends):
See your online status(includes duties you're in or other worlds)
See your search info
Request melds/repairs
(If following) lodestone info
Join parties if someone else is leader

Additional info:
If you were Eternal bonded with someone and you rescind the bond, It only does it for your end. Their ring will still work to teleport to you. This is unacceptable regardless of what mindset Yoshi P has.

I know some suggested ways to combat this is to report them. But it's very hard to prove that someone is stalking you if you port to the same area. They could easily say they just happened to go there for a unrelated reason. It's also hard to know if any action was taken since generally, you don't get any notification if anything was done.

The only way to be rid of someone attempting to stalk you is to completely move Data Regions since DC travel is a thing now. This should not be a thing still yet it still is. I understand that Yoshi P doesn't want to do it because of a JP mindset, but he needs to come to terms that bad people play this game and he needs to protect players.

I really hope I'm not the only one that sees this as an issue.

Q: When I delete a person from my friends list, I want my character to disappear from theirs, as well!

Yoshida: That would lead to the problem of “Why did he delete me?” and might cause trouble, so we didn’t do that on purpose.

Full interview:https://gamerescape.com/2019/01/04/y...-yoshi-p-walk/

We need an achievement for capping our blacklist.

[Amarande]

Here's the issue with the housing thing because even if they remove the ability to teleport to your FC or whatever, nothing is stopping the person from simply walking to your ward and to your front door. I don't think a fix for that is even possible because of how the neighborhoods are set up.

Yep, this is an organic problem with the neighborhood system; I expect the Lord of the Rings MMO has the very same potential issues as well (it's just that the much smaller player base there tends to mitigate them, both by having far fewer people - especially general trolls, who tend to go where there's the most people to rile up - to worry about and by the fact that the smaller the playerbase, the more important it is not to be a jerk if you want to do anything social in the future). Black Desert, too, but the average Black Desert home is so likely to either be completely empty or a psychedelic mess of random cash shop furniture that most people don't really even care about visiting other folks' houses (unlike XIV, where touring neighborhoods to see the pretty decorations is a not infrequent casual pastime).

I'm not sure there's that great a solution for it though because instanced housing goes to the other extreme: typically, instanced houses are almost too inaccessible to others. Often, you not only need to be on someone's friends list, but in some systems you even need to actually be partied with them before you can visit their home. Entering guild houses is typically exclusively restricted to actual members (so no more FCs throwing parties for the server/datacenter under such a system). Especially in games this heavily based around instanced content as the main max level activity, it even actively contributes to a ghost town environment (remember WoD in WoW where everyone just hung in their Garrison all day and you barely saw anyone at all unless you were in a PvP or raid area?).

Ultimately if Square isn't going to fix their friends list/black list faults then they need to have better access to GMs to handle issues. I was able to get my own stalker situation sorted by them but I know many don't get that same option.

All large online social systems suffer from this issue; I'm not actually even sure it's economically viable (especially with how much stuff is based in Cali, where wages and COL are so high that your subscription basically just pays a janitor to clean up the coffee cups from a meeting) to humanly police the system, unless we're going to go back to the old 90s days of pay-per-hour/minute online socialization.

Unfortunately, humans are also necessary to police the system (as we see with how poorly the automated enforcement on YouTube, Facebook or Discord can operate, and the free-fall collapse of Twitter after the mass staff departure, we are nowhere close to machine learning being able to handle it on its own).

This is actually why I sometimes fear that MMO devs have been beginning to actively throw the casual social player under the bus: it's simply becoming too heavy a responsibility to have to moderate a large social environment, while if things were more purely about streaming and e-sports, the former would seem to be mostly Twitch's problem while in the latter, there at least should be a greater expectation of professionalism to mitigate misbehavior ...

[Gralna]

From what I understand devs are worried if they make unfriending someone apply to both players, that it'll create stressful situations where someone is confronted about removing them from their friends list.

Why this is, I have no idea, I've been playing MMO's since 2001 and can never recall major drama in any of the communities from unfriending someone, unfriending was usually a result of already existing drama.

Do I agree with this reasoning? Not really, I actually find it more awkward sending someone a friend request when I was already on theirs (typically from removing inactive friends, that then come back). It has also been pointed out in multiple other threads here and across various social media platforms, it gives too many tools to stalkers.

https://gamerescape.com/2019/01/04/y...-yoshi-p-walk/

https://www.pcgamesn.com/final-fanta...orn/harassment

[WP1990]

As someone who has encountered many mentally scarred women in FF14 due to really bad experiences with other players. I agree that the remove/block feature needs an overhual.
The lodestone should have the option to be toggled to private much like adventure plates. This will prevent tracking/stalking.
The remove friend feature should be done on both accounts. This too should mitigate stalking. Also, the player search option should be modified with the blacklist system as to prevent the blacklisted player from seeing them.

Party and Crossword PFs however should not be altered since the Party leads can simply boot the player.

As to the non tell chat. There should be an interface that customizes and filters chat from the blacklisted players. The UI for the most part is already there it just needs some tweaks in code to be implemented.

As to PvP abuse this is where things get insanely murky in my opinion. I have no idea why blacklisted players would affect queve times and if it exists, it should be removed. That is horrible for the balance of PvP and a huge detriment to the PvP experience. Besides, CC has macro commands. You can't customize your text therefore there is no need to have blacklisted members affected by queve times. That's litterally why the ELO system was invented for competitive games. Good players rise to the top and the ******** stay at the bottom where they belong.

In regards to if the system was implemented as an anti grief measure. Ranked games generally follow a 30/30/60 principle. Someone griefing 1 or 2 games will have little impact on a players progression.