In addition to Square Enix’s MMORPG, the suspect also used Line, which is popular in Japan and Asia, and Twitter.

Kobe News reported that the harasser used the apps to send 22 messages to the woman in an attempt to reconnect with her, but also to tell her family about their older conversations, which he then began to harass. In Final Fantasy XIV, he could simply follow the woman, which is a decades-old bug in MMOs: blacklisting someone (because you don’t like what they’re doing) does not mean you remove them from your friends list, so the banned user can see when you’re logged in, what zone you’re in, or leave messages in a guestbook (visitors can write to us when they’re in your house).

On the game’s subreddit, you can easily find a post that has over 6000 upvotes, so this is a fairly long-standing problem. Harassment and stalking is forbidden, and with enough evidence we can go to the Game Master (moderator, so to speak), but all this happens because after all this time Square Enix could not or would not fix the shortcoming, and so we waste time that could be spent playing games.

Back in 2021, PCGamesN asked Yoshida Nao, aka Yoshi-P, if the ban list feature might finally be redesigned: “We’ve seen in other games that there are cases where [blocking someone] eventually turns into stalking because of the way these friend lists are designed…we decided to structure our friend list the way it is – so it’s harder for the other person to find out that there’s a separation between them.” But the other person will find out soon enough.

But in an interview with MMORPG.com, we also read that there are technological hurdles: “Since players can’t visibly see what’s going on in the matchmaking process, it might be hard to understand, but let’s say we apply player blacklists to the matchmaking process – the matchmaking speed will slow down significantly if the player has a lot of people on their blacklist. I would like to do something about that, but it would be nice if [players] could understand that this is a much bigger undertaking than it might seem at first glance.

But in a live broadcast from Korea, Yoshi-P said that in addition to increasing the size of the friends list, there are plans to allow you to remove someone from it.

But did it take them this long to realize that the old system was terrible?

Source: PCGamer