Integrity matters

[Anonemoose]

Do you really think by putting any random phrase in quotes you're gonna trick me into thinking I said it? I find this tactic adorable but, it's not effective.

But that is what you said, multiple times?

[Turtledeluxe]

It's not about whataboutism, it's a matter of not engaging in personal hypocrisy. If I'm expected to condemn the whole of FF14, developer and community alike over this, I would need to wheel out hundreds if not thousands more franchises and fandoms for being equally guilty of the things FF14 stands accused of "enabling" because this is sadly not an isolated incident. FF14 is not some radical exception to the way predators operate, nor do I feel it's done anything out of the ordinary to somehow be a "bigger haven" of that kind of criminal conduct. It's ironic you brought up furries actually, because lord knows they get accused of all kinds of horrible things just because a few people within the fandom happened to commit those acts. Not just a "4chan in the early/mid 2000s" thing either, I still get people accusing me of animal abuse/molestation to this day on even the most "enlightened and inclusive" spaces online because some people latch onto negative stereotypes and will NEVER let go.

Just so you know, that is whataboutism. Have you looked it up? There's no hypocrisy. The original post is not asking about other games nor is it gauging your apathy toward over predators. I would argue the thread was never even about predators, it's actually about the general sexual tone of the game's population and sexual contents that are again, built into it via story and glam. Age disparity isn't a concern strictly because of predators, it's also just common sense. If you want my opinion, we don't need adults and children interacting in spaces where potentially 18+ content is going on and people are dressed 18+ (if at all). And when you continue to blame parents you're actually also blaming potential victims who quite literally are not capable of making decisions the same way you and I are as grown adults. They do not have the same experience or awareness. They cannot be expected to have parents hand holding them every second of every day. As such its actually yes, on the community to some degree to look out for them on the basis of them being human beings. I also don't retract my furrie comment. I didn't say that to imply that they are predators. I'm not calling the devs predators.

certainly welcome to demand that any and all fandoms "police themselves" to prevent any and all possible monstrous elements from ever entering their space ever again, but that has repeatedly proven to be impossible and they always creep up again. But more importantly, it will never change the view

I'm not demanding anything really. I agree with the consensus that the devs should have intervened in this a long time ago (and it's never too late) by, as others have suggested, implementing some kind of dev-approved toolkit. As far as G-pose having a 17 plus rating now, I don't even know what they could do to fix that or what about G-pose exactly causes that. But if there's something within their power, then they should have done that instead of accepting a higher rating. Sure, I'm holding them accountable for what they said they opted to do. I can only assume that their priority is maintaining the sexual culture in the game, even at the expense of people under 17. This seems to make people very uncomfortable. That makes you spiral and talk about a million other games and a million other things, but I'm talking about this game right now and this dev team.

isn't to say things shouldn't be done to deal with the horrible people when they're discovered, that's what the Terms of Service and ACTUAL police are for (putting aside how anyone might feel about their country's law enforcement for a moment), but I'm not going to ask for the impossible that we can prevent all potential "breaches" or treat one fandom over another as somehow being worse than the rest, especially when most of us are not in any position to check people at the gate before they even get in here, or how often we are completely oblivious to what's going on within other sub-groups. I think most of us weren't even aware of this CSAM ring until it got brought up recently, that's how amazing our "preventative" measures were it seems that you and I "failed" for however long it was around for.

I've never argued that this could have been prevented or that all possible crime can be prevented in the game, nor do I think there's even a solution that exists that could do so. The server side solution that all these players are acting smug about, like, 'ah, yes, this is the solution I've been longing for".. Is completely reactive. It doesn't even prevent anything. Are players responsible? I'm not really sure about that, but what we can say is that the lead developer of this game has a don't ask, don't tell a policy about breaking the terms of service, and unfortunately part of human nature is that once a leader has that kind of attitude, it does signal to every single person below them that, "hey, it's okay if I'm doing something bad as long as no one knows about it". And before you argue that that's not the case, please consider that this thread is full of, "hey, if it doesn't affect you, why are you so worried about it?" Or "if you can't see it, why are you so worried about it?". Consider this doesn't just have to do with the rare case of predators, but it also has to do with all other points made in the original post.

Overall, it is impossible for me to prove that statements of developers or the community is what directly led to crimes occurring. I feel that's a pointless exercise. People wanted actual arguments and so that's what I gave them. So far honestly no one has really changed my mind on anything or, in my view, disproven anything. In fact, you're just moving to things I never argued. We opt into the game based on the terms of service, not Yoshi P statements or anything else. Mods are unilateral actions. Mods are used for good reasons as well as not so good reasons. This game has sexual content in it. Gpose is rated 17+. The dev team are, in some cases, questionable people and have said questionable things. That's not to say they're predators, I just think they're irresponsible.

Ultimately, we're all arriving at the same place, slowly, one at a time. First it was, "doing anything about mods will ruin the game". Then it became, "oh, maybe it's okay if we have a dev-approved toolkit". First it was, "barely anyone cheats or automates", and now it's "oh, let's do a server side solution that actually data logs when people do those things". First it was "we are a puritanical, 'nothing to see here' culture". Now it's "hey, every game has this problem. So it's not on Final Fantasy XIV alone to fix it." so did OP have valid points or did they not? I'm very confused (/s).

[VanillaWafer]

It's unfortunate that many people who are vocal about anti-cheat platforms use those criticisms to shield this game from scrutiny.

I don't think criticism of a particular anti-cheat solution necessarily amounts to shielding the game from scrutiny. You can oppose or question an anti-cheat platform while still believing Square Enix should be doing substantially more to detect and punish cheating.

The important distinction is between debating the tool and dismissing the underlying problem. Those aren't the same thing.

Ultimately, I just want cheaters punished and integrity restored to the game. It doesn't really matter to me how they go about achieving it, but it is readily apparent that many players also want that objective achieved.

Anti-cheat software is one possible tool, but it isn't the objective. The objective is detecting and addressing cheating and automation in a way that restores confidence in legitimate achievements.

That's why I think the server-side behavioral approach mentioned by Carighan is worth discussing. It targets the actual behavior rather than making the entire debate hinge on whether SQEX should install a particular type of anti-cheat software.

If the goal is genuinely “restore integrity,” then I'd rather see a concrete discussion of which behaviors can be reliably detected, what legitimate behavior looks like, and what enforcement should follow from those findings.

[Carighan]

Right, anti cheats have their own problems, some of which aren't minor and I'd rather not deal with them. From my own experience those problems could easily eclipse the ones that this thread is centered on. It's also not even a silver bullet. How does anti cheat prevent account piloting for one thing?

Exactly, or like I say modern drivers and even hardware are powerful enough (was it MSI with the AI-fueled cheater monitor?) to do whole cheating and botting without any need for direct software-interacts-with-client stuff that an anti-cheat would detect.

Really, in authorative server designs there is no reason not to make the server the one to hunt for cheaters and botters. It can "trivially"(tm) be changed to have an idea of what the maximum behavior a client would allow a legitimate user would look like from the server perspective, and flag behavior that repeatedly or consistently exceeds that capability. This also has the extra upside of being automatically scaled to where cheating or botting could be disruptive to other players: If it cannot be observed externally (as in, the server can't figure out you're doing something "off") then naturally it is also not visible to the other players who seeing the same things you are sending to the server. And if other players can notice and be disrupted by what a cheater is doing, this is because unnatural behavior is sent to the server, which it can in turn flag and act upon.

A big example here because it came up early in the thread is using external tools to artificially make your client behave as if your network connection were better than it actually is.
Independent of the separate discussion whether such "optimistic" network behavior shouldn't be baked into the game anyways like with all games released in the past two+ decades, this is something that a server would, if used in a sensible manner, be unable to detect.
That is, send your input at 100ms delay, what you actually have, and that obviously looks normal. If a bit laggy. Send it at 20ms delay using a tool, and it still looks entirely normal both to the server and to other players. After all, plenty other players play with 20ms delay naturally, nothing weird is happening here.
Now however, send it with 0ms, and the server can catch up on that, as you'd be doing something players just flat out never could naturally. I think in FFXIV's server architecture ~12-16ms is the absolute lowest you could ever be unless you are sitting at the server itself.

And likewise someone brought up tools that also reduce animation locks by hacking the client to further allow faster and more optimized input of abilities. If used very very modestly and within the context of the above ping-reduction, this is unnoticably to both the server and other players. It's non-disruptive, it needs no flagging. Someone on a worse connection with a slow PC would effectively just be able to input commands as if they had better internet and a better rig (hence me saying like all modern games they ought to bake this part into the client itself!), levelling the playing field a little bit.
But in theory, you can use this to send extra commands to the server that you should not have been able to send. This can be detected by other players (there's a note on a logging site about them having to discard such logs), but importantly, the server ought to trivially be able to detect this as it's just flat out not possible without cheating!

So there's an inherent overlap between "This is disruptive to me, I as another player can notice this person is doing something!" and "The server can also detect this person is doing something, and I can flag/tempban/ban this player.". Which is good. It matches the solution to the observed (and observable!) problem space.

[jomas_45]

This game does have sex adjacent content, but it's become less of a thing since ShB. Actually, there's less sex talk in the German translation. All the creepy NPCs hitting on simpering girls in Limsa either say something different, or the girls tell them where they can stick it. Main storylines are preserved, but the random flavour text is not.

I think the over sexualisation may be on the English translation, which is famously quite different from the Japanese script.

[BigCheez]

Do you really think by putting any random phrase in quotes you're gonna trick me into thinking I said it? I find this tactic adorable but, it's not effective.

Ok, if you would prefer the direct quote then let's go with "typing slurs in chat".

So, which of those messages were you interpreting as "typing slurs in chat"?

The irony of trying to claim that this isn't what you said while what we're talking about is you putting words in other people's mouths btw.

[Len_]

Ok, if you would prefer the direct quote then let's go with "typing slurs in chat".

So, which of those messages were you interpreting as "typing slurs in chat"?

The irony of trying to claim that this isn't what you said while what we're talking about is you putting words in other people's mouths btw.

That isn't what I said though. My posts are right there. You won't find "hurling slurs at people" in any of them.

[JohnLakeside]

Ok, if you would prefer the direct quote then let's go with "typing slurs in chat".

So, which of those messages were you interpreting as "typing slurs in chat"?

The irony of trying to claim that this isn't what you said while what we're talking about is you putting words in other people's mouths btw.

The dude you're talking to is a troll. He confuses his pedantry with intelligence.

Edit: Just checked his post history cuz his low wavelength argumentation felt familiar. He was in my "Banter" thread saying the most inane garbo wahaha.

[BigCheez]

That isn't what I said though. My posts are right there. You won't find "hurling slurs at people" in any of them.

Which is why in my last post I used the exact quote - "typing slurs in chat" - to prevent you from dancing around the issue instead of answering the question, yet you seem to be doing that anyway.

Which of the messages that you quoted did you interpret to mean "typing slurs in chat"?

[Len_]

Which is why in my last post I used the exact quote - "typing slurs in chat" - to prevent you from dancing around the issue instead of answering the question, yet you seem to be doing that anyway.

Which of the messages that you quoted did you interpret to mean "typing slurs in chat"?

I just think it's funny how you can't not lie. You said

The irony of trying to claim that this isn't what you said

It's "ironic" to claim something that's evidently true based on my posts which anyone can read with their own eyes? Or are you saying I claimed I didn't say "typing slurs in chat"? Which is also a lie.


Your little bait post here didn't get any engagement from me because I saw it for what it was and don't personally get anything out of responding to it.

Yeah, I think "people who don't like botters are secretly just mad because they can't say slurs" might be the most unhinged opinion I've ever read but at this point, I'm not even surprised.

Now you're just coming across as desperate.