FFXIV: Naoki Yoshida addresses concerns surrounding third-party tool during Live Letter 85

Concern has been building within the Final Fantasy XIV community lately over a worrying third-party tool called PlayerScope, which꧂ exploits a weakness in the Blacklist feature to track down players. During LLP 85, Naoki Yoshida took a moment to address concerns. 

Before viewers were informed about what to expect from the upcoming patch 7.2: Seekers of Eternity, Yoshida took a moment to discuss the worrying plugin, with Foxclon (Toshio Murouchi) providing English Trans💜lations. 

He began by stating that, regardless of what the plugin can find, it cannot pull personal identifying details about💙 any player. It’s reassuring to know that the plugin isn’t too much of a security risk, but that doesn’t stop it from being problematic.

The plugin works by exploiting the Blacklist feature, which was updated as part of Dawntrail’s release to ensure that if you blacklisted one character on somebody’s account would also add their alternate characters to the blacklist as well, preventiꦺng somebody from being able to find you on an alternate character. This was a commonly requested feature and highly celebrated when it was implemented, but the new system haꦗs backfired and allowed for PlayerScope to be created and abused. 

After explaining how it works, Yoshida went on to discuss 𝓰what the development team plans to do about it. He didn’t go into too much detail, stating that they are still actively working on the issue and more details would be given soon. However, he did say that changes would be coming to the system in patch 7.2 when it releases at some point in late March. 

However it changes, Yoshida assured that the changes already made to prevent stalking or harassment would remain in place. There are no plans to return to the old blacklist system, but changes will be c🌟omingꦆ to counteract this plugin and what it can currently do. 

As alway♔s, Yoshida urged viewers to stay awa✤y from any third-party tools or plugins, reminding them that they are strictly against FFXIV‘s terms of service and that players caught using them risk being banned permanently from the game.