Final Fantasy 14 got a selection of new blacklist features in Dawntrail aimed at helping players deal with in-game stalkers, but the backend details of those features led to the creation of some exploitative mods that some community members have feared might make the problem even worse. Now, Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida says the devs are working on fixes in time for the upcoming patch 7.2.
You can read our previous coverage on the exploit for more details on how it works, but in short, the new blacklist means that when you block a character, you now block all characters tied to an account. That function is facilitated by the fact that servers now broadcast an account ID for all the characters you come into contact with. This isn't visible to players, but if the right mods were created, you could collect account ID information and start building a list of every character tied to a given player's account.
A mod that did exactly this soon went public, and, while it's since been driven underground, players came to fear that stalkers would use the information generated by this mod to create alternate accounts and start harassing a target's alternate characters.
- Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail helped players block stalkers, but the problem might get much worse with a backend exploit some mods are already taking advantage of
- Final Fantasy 14 gets its biggest post-Dawntrail patch yet in 7.2 next month, adding a new Savage tier, trials, Phantom Jobs, Cosmic Exploration, and more
A few weeks after these concerns started taking hold, Yoshi-P put out a public statement noting that the devs "will continue to take a firm stance against" the usage of third-party mods, and were exploring both "requesting that the tool in question be removed and deleted" and "pursuing legal action."
In today's Letter from the Producer broadcast (which was entirely in Japanese, but helpfully translated by the folks at the unofficial FF14 Discord), Yoshi-P reiterated some of the details from that previous statement, reconfirming that no personal information – such as address or payment information – could be accessed by the tool.
Nonetheless, Yoshi-P said "I am very disappointed that this kind of tool exists, but we will be improving the system going forward," according to that fan translation. These improvements – which the devs are remaining vague about for now – will start to land in the upcoming patch 7.2, which promises to be the biggest Dawntrail update yet.
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