On "Infringing upon Others" and "Negatively impacting design"

[Valence]

First I'd like to show appreciation for the letter of the producer on mod culture that took the time to tell us more of his mind on the matter and clarify a few things.

Now while I still find it's beating around the bush a little too much and could need further clarification, and putting aside that I find a bit ludicrous that one of the reasons to crack down on Mare that was brought up can literally be boiled down to "sharing visual mods negatively affects bragging rights for players that ran an ultimate", I do understand other more serious concerns like the spreading of NSFW mods publicly and damaging the image of the game. But again on the latter, it's not Mare that was posting NSFW screenshots on social media, but players at the individual level, which makes me a little puzzled once more on the examples being given and the justifications that go with it.

However seeing talks about infringement upon others negatively, bragging rights, mogstation rights, or anything else, this immediately makes me wonder about other third party tools like fflogs and tomestone. They are not visual mods and don't modify games files directly, but they certainly do have a wide spread impact over the whole game and community, and some sides that I can safely say, are clearly negative and infringing upon others.

FFlogs and Tomestone aren't something that stays at the individual level, aren't something that's kept in private as it is literally publicly available websites tracking data and activity for every player in the game. Furthermore, anybody can upload data obtained in the game about another player without them knowing, and without their consent. I am not writing this from a legal point of view, but from a consistency point of view. If you think that third parties can be infringing upon others in a bad way, then I want you to take a cold, hard look at those types of websites and data aggregators, that while they may provide a lot of useful information at a statistical level or for self improvement, they also collect data about other players without their consent and are usually widely used to dismiss or outright harass others.

Note: the point of the thread is not to take down and burn the websites, thank you.

[Catwho]

used to dismiss or outright harass others

And when that happens, it becomes a reportable offense, just like any other form of in game harassment.

If you try to join a party finder and someone says "no thanks gray parser" - that's a GM worthy comment.

SE can't do anything about that conversation happening on Discord, but if it happens in the game? It's a rule violation just like slapping your Mare code in an adventurer plate.

[Johners]

I certainly think Tomestone and FF Logs should be opt-in, instead of the current opt-out system. I'm not too bothered about the data tomestone collects regarding mount acquisition, for example, as many of those items come from alternative sources. Although we're yet to have an equivalent of WoW Classic's /spit moment against people using a cash store mount. It wouldn't be a big ask for Square Enix to force these websites into becoming opt-in for combat-specific data.

There's certainly game design issues around combat anaylsis that really aught to be improved in 2025. No, the duty recorder is not a good enough feature. Just take a page from WoW's book and provide a feature to save the battle log to a plain text file. At the very least this means no third-party tool is needed to collect that data. Analysing is another story but at the same time, the ToS is already setup to protect people from being abused and harassed.

I will say that Yoshi-P's Disappointed Dad stance on the broader topic is not only unhelpful but also negative for the game. By avoiding conflict and not enforcing the existing terms of service, they've effectively created second-class citizens out of anybody that either chooses not to mod or simply can't on their preferred platform.

[Oizen]

I certainly think Tomestone and FF Logs should be opt-in, instead of the current opt-out system. I'm not too bothered about the data tomestone collects regarding mount acquisition, for example, as many of those items come from alternative sources. Although we're yet to have an equivalent of WoW Classic's /spit moment against people using a cash store mount. It wouldn't be a big ask for Square Enix to force these websites into becoming opt-in for combat-specific data.

There's certainly game design issues around combat anaylsis that really aught to be improved in 2025. No, the duty recorder is not a good enough feature. Just take a page from WoW's book and provide a feature to save the battle log to a plain text file. At the very least this means no third-party tool is needed to collect that data. Analysing is another story but at the same time, the ToS is already setup to protect people from being abused and harassed.

I will say that Yoshi-P's Disappointed Dad stance on the broader topic is not only unhelpful but also negative for the game. By avoiding conflict and not enforcing the existing terms of service, they've effectively created second-class citizens out of anybody that either chooses not to mod or simply can't on their preferred platform.

They can't be opt-in. If they were they'd be a free list of players who break the ToS lol

[Aravell]

They can't be opt-in. If they were they'd be a free list of players who break the ToS lol

They can easily make the site opt-in if they don't display the names of anyone. The data will still be the same, people can still look up any of their team's rotational/fight issues with the timeline when they upload a log and people can also go look at the top damage in any job and copy their rotation to improve their own damage.

The only people that would be affected by no names being displayed would be the people who like seeing their name on rank 1 or people who want to bash people by looking up their logs. Both far out of the scope of "self-improvement tool" that people tout the tool to be.

[Oizen]

They can easily make the site opt-in if they don't display the names of anyone. The data will still be the same, people can still look up any of their team's rotational/fight issues with the timeline when they upload a log and people can also go look at the top damage in any job and copy their rotation to improve their own damage.

The only people that would be affected by no names being displayed would be the people who like seeing their name on rank 1 or people who want to bash people by looking up their logs. Both far out of the scope of "self-improvement tool" that people tout the tool to be.

Because it was never meant to be for self improvement. Thats just the defense.

[Its_Kazzy_D]

They can't be opt-in. If they were they'd be a free list of players who break the ToS lol

Not necessarily, as you can be console-only and still appear on FF logs.

[LegendWait]

Did you bring your complains to FFlogs or tomestone?

[Minali]

Did you bring your complains to FFlogs or tomestone?

Not the one who was asked, but I actually wrote an e-mail to tomestone prior to Dawntrail. I wasn't asking them directly why they don't made it opt in, only asked how to opt out, because there was no info about it anywhere on the website (at this time) how to do this. However, I also mentioned why I don't want to have any part of it, my concerns about harassment and stuff. All I got was the info about what code I have to enter to my lodestone profile and that they're going to respect the "new" privacy option introduced with Dawntrail and that was that. No reaction to anything else. So I don't know what they would answer if one would ask them directly to make it opt-in, but I didn't get the feeling privacy was in any way a concern of theirs. (Don't let me stop anyone from trying to ask more directly though, who knows, maybe they care and were just busy.)

In the end I made an account in both tomestone and fflogs to hide the info (uploaded by others or scraped from the lodestone I might add) because the amount of metadata you can get from how or when you play the game, especially on tomestone, is really awkward to me. And when Dawntrail dropped I hid my profile there as well. As long as I am not going into savage raiding, let alone apply for a static, this is simply nobody's business how I spend my time in this game. (Maybe that's the European brain speaking, idk, but how little many people in this community give about privacy is giving me the creeps, but whatever.)
And the thing is, the data is still being able to show up, because even with me opting out, not having any parsing tool installed let alone using it, the data is being collected and stored, because as soon as I set my profile public, all the old stuff is going to show up right away. (And it also appears on xivanalysis with full name, but for this you have to have a direct log link and that's just a very unlikely thing for random strangers who never met me to have.)

So the opt out option we have, isn't actually helping you to opt out of this whole stuff. It just makes your profile unsearchable with the most obvious things, but as soon as anyone running a duty with you uploads a log, you're part of these systems, even if you never even heard of them. Your name isn't even being switched to "Anonymous" or "(job) 2" or whatever in other people's logs, which would not impact the person using the logs for self improvement in the slightest.

Not sure what SE is able to do about this though. Saying it's prohibited? Parsing is already against the ToS, and that was said multiple times. I could imagine that new function of hiding your profile entirely might have been with websites scraping the lodestone like this in mind, not just individual stalkers. And yeah if anyone openly shames you for your DPS in game in no uncertain terms you can report it, but I can imagine a lot of stuff is happening in discords or voice chats or so, and they cannot act based upon this. (Which I understand. You cannot guarantee that "SugarBunny130" in Discord and "Sugar Bunny" in Game are the same person after all.) The only people who could do anything about this are the people who run these websites, and they are not going to change a more convenient opt-out system for an opt-in system likely needing a bit more effort unless the community at large demands it. (Or if they get a letter from SE's lawyer but I suppose then they'd rather just shut this down to be sure, which would cause a lot of trouble from a lot of streamers I could imagine, more than now, and not be in SE's interest.)

[TomsYoungerBro]

Did you bring your complains to FFlogs or tomestone?

Unironically a fair point, specifically with the addition of tomestone. The progress bar on that site is used quite a bit to try and weed out prog liars in PF.