FF14 Dawntrail is almost here, and I’ve been packing my shorts and sunglasses ready for our “definitely just a holiday and nothing more dangerous” trip to Tural in the new Final Fantasy 14 expansion. But as the critically acclaimed MMORPG takes us to shores anew, it’s important that our travels aren’t spoiled by any nasty holidaygoers or malicious locals. Thankfully, game director and producer Naoki Yoshida has just detailed the introduction of new FF14 blacklist features coming with the 7.0 update that will give you a way to avoid any potential problem players.
The Final Fantasy 14 community is, on the whole, an absolute delight. As someone who has always been wary of encountering random players in any form of online multiplayer, the general level of comfort I feel interacting with FF14 players is a big reason why it’s widely considered one of the best MMORPGs of all time. Developer Square Enix has clearly put the work in to cultivate this, encouraging and rewarding positive behavior while diminishing the benefits of being selfish or rude.
You’re always going to get the occasional bad actor, however, and that’s clearly something that’s been on Yoshida’s mind in the run-up to the FF14 Dawntrail release date. “I don’t really like to have too many rules myself,” he remarks during the 80th FF14 Live Letter from the Producer, which took place as part of the game’s ongoing 14-hour livestream to celebrate the tenth anniversary of A Realm Reborn.
“An example would be supporting gamepads – I think players should have the freedom to choose their own environment.” However, he continues, “We have so many players now that use this game as a sort of second world, and I think it is time we implement features to protect everyone’s experience.”
“We decided to implement this a little over half a year ago,” Yoshida explains. “I believe a lot of peoples’ time is switching towards a virtual world and will keep going in that direction. I’ve always been thinking about how these features would look. 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.”
The first of these additions is an improved blacklist tool that will let you mark a player as someone you don’t want to see – this will now not only hide their messages, but will also completely remove their character model from your game, and will apply to all characters that are tied to that player’s service account, meaning they can’t switch over to an alt and continue to pester you. “We understand concerns that asked to just prevent matching with those players,” Yoshida adds, “but that would make the system a lot more complicated, sorry.”
If that’s a bit too extreme for you, you can simply add them to your mute list, which will hide their chat messages (this also applies to all characters on the player’s service account). If you’re put into a party or alliance with a player you have muted, you’ll be given a notification with the option to temporarily unmute them if you wish. “For most things you will probably use the mute list,” Yoshida explains, “and if it gets really bad you can use the blacklist.”
A term filter has also been introduced that allows you to filter out messages with specific terms you don’t want to see – this applies to the say, tell, yell, shout, and emote channels, but won’t affect linkshells, party chat, or free company chat. The example given suggests that the entire message will be hidden, rather than just the individual word, so use this carefully.
Finally, a new “estate expulsion” feature will let you boot any troublesome sorts out of your house. You’ll be able to access this if you’re a free company master or an estate owner, and can also hand the privileges to up to four other FC members and fellow housemates. Players that have expulsion privileges will boot anyone on their blacklists out of the estate grounds automatically as soon as they enter the estate.
Alongside this, additional privacy settings have been added to the web-based FF14 Lodestone, giving you more control over who can see various parts of your Lodestone character page and introducing a block list for the Lodestone specifically – although it will also pull in any characters on your in-game blacklist.
Much like Yoshida, you certainly always hope you never need to use these tools – and I’ve been fortunate enough to have a vast majority of very positive experiences. But I’ve heard enough horror stories from people who had a single player making their time in FF14 a nightmare, and in some cases players who dropped the game altogether as a result, so this is a very welcome quick-fix solution to help in those situations.
If you’re ready to get even more excited about our upcoming adventure, be sure to check out the latest graphical upgrade details and the FF14 benchmark tool to ensure your PC is ready to go when July rolls around. We’ve also got everything you need to know about the new jobs, the FF14 Viper and the FF14 Pictomancer, that we’ll be able to learn in Dawntrail.
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