Re: Regarding the Use of Third-Party Programs and Player Safety

[Daralii]

Just for my understanding are you talking about the character id or account id?

[Kazuke_Miso]

It's worse than that. There is a one-to-one mapping from the account ID received on your client to the 'real' account ID. You don't even need to build some relational database to correlate the characters together. They just literally need to figure out the algorithm that obfuscates the ID, and this has already been done. The only question is when the stalking plugin creator will do the same.

[Saraide]

Genius level solution!!!

[Kandraxx]

They can't nuke the plugin functionality or the Mare Lamentorum house party crowd (70% of all subs) will be gone. And the self-proclaimed 'top raider' YouTubers who prog content with 50 plugins and XIVcombo autorotation off-camera will also be gone for good.

Not too great for business, eh?

[MiaBlaze-Cari]

Why am I not surprised that their "fix" is dismantled within 24h. Not only did they see no reason to actually fix it asap, no we just wait for the next patch because duh and now that? Square clearly doesn't care that people get stalked and doesn't care that they're effectively enable stalking with these questionable things. So people are either left being stalked left and right or have to rely on the stalker data to defend themself from said stalkers. Nice move Square! On the other side, looking on the known issues with this patch...I have no faith at all anymore. At this point just hire someone who has actual knowledge on this topic so this can actually get fixed.
Tho actually I am surprised that you failed so spectacularly on fixing this issue. Like cool, the stalkers dont get the actual ID anymore, yet they can still map all your alts and retainers to one account with this altered ID. GGWP nothing changes, you just shifted the problem from Point A to Point B, please look forward to it!

[Hazusu]

This is incompetence. Pure and simple. CBU3 just proved that their technical know-how is simply not up to par.

[Sarevok_Thordin]

The "fix" is a joke and half-baked.

Stop having the client do any kind of processing and have it do a simple "isOnAccountBlacklist(Target)" check on the server with a simple yes/no return.

The client should not be seeing IDs AT ALL. Honestly shocked at this.

[Wyssahtyn]

the level of incompetence on display from these devs, while expected, is still kind of shocking lol. there was only ever one acceptable fix for this entire issue and they still screwed it up. like, did the idea of "stop sending trackable info to clients" just not come up at all?

[NaoSen]

I was so dead set sure that this would be fixed in this patch to the point of siding with SE in another thread that it would be fixed. Since SURELY you cannot be stupid enough to half-ass it when you've taken heat on it, spoken about it on live letter etc...
Anything reversible will be reversed yet still they do it ????

The "fix" that isn't a fix didn't even need a major patch to implement they just used it to justify blacklist reset or as a patch feature point.

Why does this community have to be so freaking weird that this is even a issue to begin with, we have websites that maintain a profile of you based on your lodestone information history going back years (Past name's, free companies etc... whatever lodestone exposed), plugin's that once more use lodestone to maintain character name changes (It was in the github readme as one of the plugins that inspired it). "Want to be a weirdo ? Come play FFXIV, there's a home for you here !"

[Kaurhz]

I was so dead set sure that this would be fixed in this patch to the point of siding with SE in another thread that it would be fixed. Since SURELY you cannot be stupid enough to half-ass it when you've taken heat on it, spoken about it on live letter etc...
Anything reversible will be reversed yet still they do it ????

The "fix" that isn't a fix didn't even need a major patch to implement they just used it to justify blacklist reset or as a patch feature point.

Why does this community have to be so freaking weird that this is even a issue to begin with, we have websites that maintain a profile of you based on your lodestone information history going back years (Past name's, free companies etc... whatever lodestone exposed), plugin's that once more use lodestone to maintain character name changes (It was in the github readme as one of the plugins that inspired it). "Want to be a weirdo ? Come play FFXIV, there's a home for you here !"

Honestly I don't think the weird-ness is actually exclusive to XIV, some other communities are just as bad... The only major difference is that Yoshida's stance on third party tools, etc., just allows for these things to go utterly unchecked in broad daylight because heaven forbid we risk upsetting players by taking a hard stance on topics that should have a hard stance. If there were a backbone and if they actually enforced their own ToS, then people wouldn't dare try this stunt, just as they wouldn't in many other games.