FFXIV Team Working to Counter 'Stalking Mod,' Yoshi-P Explains During Live Letter Stream

During the Letter from the Producer Live on Friday, Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida doubled down on a statement against a now-infamous “stalker mod.” The mod in question lets players see all of the characters on one account, sparking widespread anxiety across the community, given the prominence of harassment and stalking in online communities like MMORPGs. 

Yoshida “cannot say how far we're going but with patch 7.2, we are taking steps to counteract this.” The director-producer also confirmed that the mod in question doesn’t gather anything more than the characters on an account, so no personal information is accessible through any tools. He previously also acknowledged this in an official forum post, but hearing from him on the live stream, as part of the Live Letter, adds some gravity to the situation. 

This “stalker mod” and the outrage behind it solicited a rare response from the FFXIV team on the matter of third-party plugins. Back in January, Yoshida published a post stating that this specific mod would be taken seriously, and that a cease-and-desist, followed by severe legal action, would follow if steps were not taken to curb it. Since this message, the original GitHub was taken down, though other sites and Discords are allegedly hosting it still. 

For background, this debacle arose when a modder released a mod called PlayerScope that let players find and identify any other players by a client-side account ID given by FFXIV. 

Technically, the information for players’ account ID became available to data miners at the start of Dawntrail with its improved social functions. The new Blacklisting feature blocks not only the character players wish to, but all characters on that player’s account. However, since the data is stored client-side, the client would find and use the account ID, meaning anyone can find it with some digging. (It’s worth noting as well that a few things in FFXIV are client-side, including Friends, HUDs, gear sets, and hotkeys, but this seems to be the most unusual thing so far.)

But even for what it claimed to be and for the world of modding, it’s especially egregious. Players needed to log in, link their Discord to a third-party server, and opt into using the mod in order to actually opt out of being seen by the mod. Conversely, this means any player can see and collect all the account IDs of players in an area and figure out who’s playing who—hence the reputation as a “stalker” mod. Many players also pointed out the risk of needing to link a Discord account to a FFXIV account for, specifically, a mod that lets you track other players. 

Square Enix, and specifically explicitly Creative Business Unit 3, have had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about mods, as the devs have discussed before that forcing all players to use an anti-cheat would be overly intrusive. However, these generally tended to be more towards the discussion of mods such as Advanced Combat Tracker (ACT) and cosmetic mods, which don’t alter gameplay. 

That said, this is a rare break in form for the FFXIV team. Yoshida has acknowledged the flaw in the Blacklist system that allows for this plugin and stated that the developers are working on a way to stop this sort of access. 

He also requested that players don’t use plugins in general, though given how much the cosmetic community has blown up in the past few years and the prominence of DPS trackers in raiding, that may be a tall order. 

It wasn’t all doom and gloom during the Live Letter, though. We now know that we’re finally getting some of the content we’ve been asking for since Dawntrail was unveiled once 3.2 arrives in late March. 

[Translations of quotes are from “Miuna” from the r/FFXIV community Discord.]