I'm a few days behind catching up on the 80th Producer Live Letter Final Fantasy XIV Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida (aka Yoshi-P) presented on Saturday morning's (midnight counts as the next day, right?) live stream. Even with the presentation in Japanese, US-based bloggers like myself have no excuse for falling behind as the Final Fantasy XIV sub-reddit has an official Discord server which does real time translations of events. Okay, the Discord does have a link to Pandemic Legion, but I'm not worried about spy activity as I never was into EVE Online's null sec political play.
One of the last topics from the PLL is one I want to address first: improvements to FFXIV's blacklist.
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| The areas of improvement |
According to the translations, Yoshi-P provided an introduction to the topic.
I don't really like to have too many rules myself, an example would be supported game pads, I think players should have the freedom to chose their own environment. We have so many players now that use this game as sort of a second world. And I think it is time we implement for features to protect everyone's experience.
In other words, the security and bouncers at all the clubs and venues in the housing areas now have more tools than just asking people to stop being a jerk. And those who have stalkers (yes, that happens) can make their in-game lives easier as well.
I guess the first feature is that phasing has come to FFXIV starting in Dawnwalker.
In addition to the blacklisted character's messages, their character model will now also be hidden. This will apply to all characters tied to the blacklisted character's service account. This new feature is applicable to characters registered from 7.0 onwards. The blacklist will distinguish between characters blacklisted before and after 7.0.
My understanding is that the new mute list will work a lot like the old blacklist. Also, due to the complexity of the duty matching system, the devs couldn't just prevent blacklisted players from appearing in a duty.
Blacklisted characters will be displayed in certain situations where visibility is necessary, such as when partied together in a duty. Even when their character model is visible, their name will display as "Unknown" in the party list and on their nameplate. Furthermore, a notification will indicate when they speak during duties, and players may elect to temporarily see what they've written via the subcommand menu.
Yoshi-P believes the mute list will be used for most things and players will resort to using the blacklist if the situation gets really bad.
The mute list will hide a muted character's chat messages. The feature is applicable to characters blacklisted prior to 7.0. The mute list applies to all characters on a muted character's service account. Muted characters' names will display as normal. When in the same party or alliance during duties, a notification will indicate when they speak, and players may elect to temporarily see what they've written via the subcommand menu.
The blacklist and mute list do have a difference in where the lists are stored. Blacklists are stored server-side while the mute list is stored client-side. But players can place two hundred characters on each list, making for 400 characters total.
I also learned that FFXIV did not have a term filter. The new term filter filters out the entire message containing the offending word, not just the word itself. The filter only works in Say, Tell, Yell, Shout, and /emote, but does work in all circumstances, including duties. The term filter will not apply in linkshell, cross-world linkshell, party, or free company chat. And the list of terms to filter for is stored on the client, not the server.
The new estate expulsion feature will give greater granularity to who can enter or leave a player or free company home. Characters added to the no-entry list while within your estate grounds will be expelled from the grounds immediately. Characters added to the no-entry list will be unable to enter the estate for 10 days. And the ban applies to all characters on an expelled character's service account.
Perhaps the biggest part is the ability to delegate authority. Free company masters and estate owners will have access to the estate expulsion feature and can designate up to 4 free company members or housemates to have access to the function. When players with expulsion privileges are in the estate, anyone registered to their blacklists will be automatically expelled when attempting to enter the estate grounds.
Finally Yoshi-P unveiled the enhanced Lodestone privacy settings. Players will now gain the ability to limit who can view certain aspects of their Lodestone character page, including their profile, achievements, and friends. The visibility settings can be limited to friends, free company members, linkshell members, and so on. Players will also have the ability to remove themselves from Lodestone character searches.
The blocklist is also being added to the Lodestone. Notifications regarding the activity and blog entries of blocked players will no longer display. Blocked players will not see the activity of the player who blocked them. And these setting will also apply to characters added to a character's in-game blacklist.
Yoshi-P concluded the section of the PLL by stating the team had decided to implement the blocklist and other privacy features a little over 6 months ago. He also made the following statement:
I believe a lot of a persons time and life is switching towards a virtual world and will keep going towards that direction. I've always been wondering and thinking about how these features will look like in a virtual world. I've had a lot of philosophical thoughts about these features and personally I would hope people don't feel the need to use them, but I absolutely understand when it gets to a point where you have to.
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