Please stop destroying the playerbase + fix blacklist

[Johners]

Mare users genuinely have their head up their own backsides, they never carried the game. You can point out the game's declining performance but it peaked pre-Mare when WoW was in a bad state and everyone was stuck at home during the COVID pandemic. WoW was always going to recover and the gaming industry was never going to sustain those COVID numbers. Even in this "bad state" of XIV, the game is still profitable. As for Square Enix collectively, they made some bad choices with NFT games and are now making a long-term stranegychange under their new CEO. The company isn't dying, far from it.

I'd argue the game has actually suffered from the spike in popularity alongside an unsustainable "don't ask, don't tell" moderation status for third-party tools. It wasn't just Mare, there's a ton of other tools that haven't gotten very good as the larger player base meant more reasons (and more money being donated) to develop these tools. Certain WoW guilds streamed blind XIV clears and even financially contributed to the development of certain UI/raiding third-party tools.

On the topic of WoW and WoW guilds, the lead game designer of WoW was recently on Echo's Race to World First livestream. Meanwhile, in FFXIV, Square Enix no longer recognise the world first savage and ultimate clears at all due to one too many cheating scandals. All the legitimate players have been missing out on the potential of recognition because some players abused the trust (mis)placed onto the community.

The discrepancy between the haves and have nots, regardless of playing PC or console, has grown far too large. Square Enix needs to course correct the "don't ask, don't tell" policy with proper moderation of their game. That's not just issuing a round of legal takedowns every few months on the main third-party tools, they need a better toolkit to actually protect the game client. Ultimately that means a modern, kernel-level anti-cheat.

The Windows version is only two months away from only supporting Windows 11 and hardware that officially matches the requirements for a normal, out-of-box installation. There's no reason why they couldn't license something like Easy Anti-cheat (or any other solution) while also requiring Secure Boot/TPM for the game to run.

I feel this might only be a matter of time anyway, especially as all the main QoL requests are on course to be added before/by the release of the next expansion pack. It'll be interested to see if they use the first Fan Fest to announce this or just quietly drop the information in a blog post somewhere.

[ViinaS]

I's pesky how people just constantly ignore the issues that may arise if people that liked Mare quit.

It's not purely about the Joe-Shmoe that used it to attend venues. It's the ones behind those venues that put effort into it all and organized the player driven content.

The strawman of all users of Mare being pure RP Limsa AFKers is also just dumb.
These were people that needed Mare to stay subbed?

Why is that? It is cause that was the content that made them subbed after they were done with the patch or expansion content after a month and had a content drought like everyone else for 3-4 months till the next patch (depending how fast they were done with the new content).

They may not quit, but will turn from constantly subbed to "eh maybe this month to keep my house or when the new content for 2 weeks drops"

And I hope they do, SE deserves to make less money if they only shovel out content with no longevity every 4-5 months.
Ideally they finally add more QoL and RP features into the game (NOT via the cash shop SE, I know what you are thinking)

Hope certain people can still understand that and look past their hateboner while drowning in smugness.

[Mana_Azir]

I's pesky how people just constantly ignore the issues that may arise if people that liked Mare quit.

It's not purely about the Joe-Shmoe that used it to attend venues. It's the ones behind those venues that put effort into it all and organized the player driven content.

The strawman of all users of Mare being pure RP Limsa AFKers is also just dumb.
These were people that needed Mare to stay subbed?

Why is that? It is cause that was the content that made them subbed after they were done with the patch or expansion content after a month and had a content drought like everyone else for 3-4 months till the next patch (depending how fast they were done with the new content).

They may not quit, but will turn from constantly subbed to "eh maybe this month to keep my house or when the new content for 2 weeks drops"

And I hope they do, SE deserves to make less money if they only shovel out content with no longevity every 4-5 months.
Ideally they finally add more QoL and RP features into the game (NOT via the cash shop SE, I know what you are thinking)

Hope certain people can still understand that and look past their hateboner while drowning in smugness.

people managed to make interesting creative RP venues even before it existed, they just simply stopped cos of the convenience the plugins and mods provided. Coupled with the fact that numerous folks in different threads have been pointing out that it also barred vanilla and console users from such venues or rp interactions simply cos they didnt use it, its safe to assume why folks are coming to this conclusion(and before you say this isnt true, i implore you to go around and see other relevant threads and the replies of people who have felt they been excluded).
and lets be honest, most folks will return when the replacement comes in like usual as we've had hiccups like this before.

[DreadCrow]

I's pesky how people just constantly ignore the issues that may arise if people that liked Mare quit.

It's not purely about the Joe-Shmoe that used it to attend venues. It's the ones behind those venues that put effort into it all and organized the player driven content.

The strawman of all users of Mare being pure RP Limsa AFKers is also just dumb.
These were people that needed Mare to stay subbed?

Why is that? It is cause that was the content that made them subbed after they were done with the patch or expansion content after a month and had a content drought like everyone else for 3-4 months till the next patch (depending how fast they were done with the new content).

They may not quit, but will turn from constantly subbed to "eh maybe this month to keep my house or when the new content for 2 weeks drops"

And I hope they do, SE deserves to make less money if they only shovel out content with no longevity every 4-5 months.
Ideally they finally add more QoL and RP features into the game (NOT via the cash shop SE, I know what you are thinking)

Hope certain people can still understand that and look past their hateboner while drowning in smugness.

As a role-player, I'm not entirely convinced Mare was a net gain for the community. When it got big, actual role-playing venues were replaced by clubs and brothels in Party Finder. While correlation isn't causation and I'm sure there's other issues impacting things (Dawntrail losing players, the big RP servers being closed for half a year now, etc) Mare certain made the "not-really-role-playing-but-seen-as-part-of-the-role-playing community" bigger.

[AnnRam]

If the only reason you are subbed its because Mare then you never liked the game at all.

Moving to SL would be better for those who are sad that SE decided to apply their own TOS.

[Anzaman]

If the only reason you are subbed its because Mare then you never liked the game at all.

Big problem really is the huge content drought between the patches. Mare could have just been the thing that kept players active between content drops.

When it takes 4 months for them to release content, and first month of sub is enough to clear the content, there's 3 months of "nothing" which they may have earlier filled with player-created content, where as now they simply let their subs expire.

[Kaurhz]

Big problem really is the huge content drought between the patches. Mare could have just been the thing that kept players active between content drops.

When it takes 4 months for them to release content, and first month of sub is enough to clear the content, there's 3 months of "nothing" which they may have earlier filled with player-created content, where as now they simply let their subs expire.

This is the biggest issue here... majority of the development lifecycle has people relying on player curated content to fill that void, whether that is going to venues, doing RP, posing, parsing, doing fish trains, etc., -- a lot of it is player curated, and frankly if they targeted other tools then people would very quickly come to realize that the reliance on third-party for a lot of folk is just more widespread than just Mare, for instance.

You would see a similar reaction if they actually went after other tools.

[Kishin12345]

The people using the tool in question were not playing ffxiv, they were playing an illusion, a game that never officially existed. It is sad for those that enjoyed it, but it was never real and at some point just had to go. There was a decent chunk of players quitting because it existed and some of them are actually coming back now that it is gone. Personally i am happy that SE finally chose to enforce their stance against TOS breaking tools after being asked so often about it.

[Nero-Voidstails]

This is the biggest issue here... majority of the development lifecycle has people relying on player curated content to fill that void, whether that is going to venues, doing RP, posing, parsing, doing fish trains, etc., -- a lot of it is player curated, and frankly if they targeted other tools then people would very quickly come to realize that the reliance on third-party for a lot of folk is just more widespread than just Mare, for instance.

You would see a similar reaction if they actually went after other tools.

did they agree to the ToS? because I think they did meaning that they agree to not use third party tool because like someone else's said in Japan it is illegal to use mods and even punished with prison time. omg SE is a company in Japan!!! who would have know! but on all seriousness they did agree to it and they have well let it slide alots then people became bold and to bold so they took action

[Kaurhz]

did they agree to the ToS? because I think they did meaning that they agree to not use third party tool because like someone else's said in Japan it is illegal to use mods and even punished with prison time. omg SE is a company in Japan!!! who would have know! but on all seriousness they did agree to it and they have well let it slide alots then people became bold and to bold so they took action

I mean, this salad is all well and good, but their ToS is practically so inconsistently enforced that it may as well not exist in basically 99.9% of cases, but I hope that everyone coming around with this so nonchalantly will take up that good fight for them to actually properly and rigorously enforce their own ToS, otherwise it's pretty hard to ignore that it's just a thinly veiled attempt at trying to virtue signal.

The issue is probably far far less to do with the fact that people were noisy about it... They have been since the inception of the tool. They are most likely far more concerned with it leveraging the same thing that the stalker one used (Which was also fairly recently hit with a C&D.