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.
