Every time a developer touches a game, a new vulnerability for unscrupulous characters to exploit may appear. Final Fantasy 14 inadvertently fell foul of that by making it easier for players to stalk each other, even across different characters, with the release of Dawntrail. While one of the most infamous plugins responsible has been shut down, though, Square Enix is now implementing its latest fix to resolve the issue for good.
Last year, Final Fantasy 14 introduced a blacklist feature that assigned each player a unique ID, allowing it to be tracked across all their characters and accounts. The intention was to combat toxic individuals wholesale, rather than just one of their characters. Still, the result was plugins that could access this backend data, allowing anyone to digitally stalk anyone throughout the world of Eorzea.
Last month, the developer behind one of the MMO's most infamous plugins was hit with a cease and desist. Their plugin, PlayerScope, is now gone, and all our data with it, but the work to safeguard the MMO from another like it rumbles on.
"In Patch 7.3, we will be making even more significant changes to further obscure data that may potentially be used to determine whether characters belong to the same account," writes Naoki Yoshida, producer and director of Final Fantasy 14, in a post on the game's website.
He adds that this change will affect some tools currently in use, however. Firstly, your mute list will be deleted, so if there were any annoyingly chatty players you were avoiding, you'll have to re-add them. Each individual character, too, as you can no longer simply mute a player's account. The post does note that "The blacklist feature will continue to function on an account-wide basis."
Any notes you've added to your blacklist will also be deleted due to the restructuring of the data, which aims to keep information hidden from third-party tools. So, you'll have to add all that again.
Yoshida adds, "The team is preparing safeguards to further enhance the security of data associated with the blacklist feature," and he "wanted to offer my apologies ahead of these improvements, which necessitate resetting certain data and may cause some frustration for our players."
"I'm glad to see they're still working on it," writes one player on Reddit. Some aren't convinced, though. "I remain pessimistic of their changes here, given their history. We shall see." Are you happy with these changes?
While you're here, check out our ranking of the best Final Fantasy games of all-time.
