It’s been said that the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV will drop support for Square Enix’s PlayOnline viewer (it is rumored that the friends list will remain). The largest reason for this is simply that it didn’t take off as much as they thought it would. To most (if not all) players, the PlayOnline Viewer is nothing but an extra step to log into Final Fantasy XI. There are however some features that are included in the viewer that some people simply ignore, or don’t even know about. One such feature are the chat rooms.
Now keep in mind, the chat room section in POL is for the most part- deserted. Nobody is going to hang around in a chat room when they can be logged into Final Fantasy XI and still talk with friends while playing via in game chat and various instant messaging programs. However, there can always be a few interestingly named rooms in the Final Fantasy XI chat room section (above). It’s horribly obvious that there isn’t anybody at Square Enix in charge of monitoring these rooms.
Final Fantasy XI has a T rating from the ESRB and all players are required to be 13 years or older in order to play. I doubt any parent of a 13 year old would want their child wandering into this chat room area to be exposed to the things that are going on. 
image from Massively.com
This past week there was talk in the news of two World of Warcraft players ages 16 and 42 that decided to hook up in real life. And no, we don’t mean that in a way that will allow you to sleep soundly tonight. The last thing Square Enix would want to see is a similar story, only involving their unmonitored POL chat rooms. Also note that three of the four rooms pictured above are not password protected. Meaning anybody can wander in and see what’s going on.
The PlayOnline viewer has been dead for years. It never transformed into this amazing hub for online games that Square Enix had hoped it would and as a result the extra areas and services are being forgotten not only by users, but by the company. It would make sense to eliminate many of these unused features or at the very least eliminate inappropriate public chat rooms.
Why isn’t Square Enix monitoring public chat rooms? Should they remove them all together? Do you even care because it’s a feature in the PlayOnline viewer that you have never and will never use?
They have use once in a great while.
Known to veteran PS2 and 360 users as the Cold Turkey of FFXI. The Maintenance. *Shutter*
Wow, I’m shocked. I dunno whether to believe it’s real people actually looking for those things or whether people actually go into these channels >< It also did automatically remind me of the WoW cases where people would sell themselves for gold or mounts.
Well, first off, you pointed out that one of the chatrooms wasn’t password protected, yet you didn’t go in to find out if the title of the chatroom was accurate instead of a joke. I kind of doubt it’s just a joke myself, but you probably should have verified it before “going to press,” as it were.
Also, Final Fantasy XI is by far the most popular PlayOnline game, but it isn’t the only one. Most of the other games are Japan-only, but those JP-only titles have included Front Mission Online, Fantasy Earth, the Japanese version of EverQuest II (it was published by S-E over there), and the online features of Dirge of Cerberus that we never got. If I recall, currently the second-most popular POL game is a JP-only mah jong title.
Third, I’m less bothered by the lack of “monitoring” for the free chatrooms than I am by the lack of attention paid to Tetra Master, which they actually charge money for. The free chat rooms work fine, but the game they charge $1/mo for still doesn’t work right with Vista and 7?
And finally, I’m not bothered by the linked-to article at all. The kid lied and said he was 20, even then 16 is still legal in both Texas and Ontario (as well as most other US states and, I believe, all Canadian provinces), and he was never transported across intra- or international borders. It’s just some salacious non-story that’s posted to get pageviews while making the perfectly legitimate private lives of two people all too public for no good reason.
I’d rather S-E work on turning the RMT spam filters on by default rather than staying up at night worrying that people, somewhere, might have consensual sex. This is Vana’diel, not Salt Lake City.
Q. Why isn’t Square Enix monitoring public chat rooms?
A. They don’t care and people use chat rooms all the time on the internet, they are used to express ourselves with people we wouldn’t be able to come in contact in our outside lives. This certain area allows us to speak with others who we all have something in common with be it Final Fantasy or MMO’s in general. Just like in real life some things shouldn’t be expressed though, that’s where the line should be drawn, but that same line gets fuzzy as it conflicts with Human Rights and TOS.
Q.Should they remove them all together?
A.Yes. Why? If the Rated R chat moved into the game, they’d be shouting those chat room titles and could be reported and banned and never let back in the game. There could also be a possibility that player who knows a responsible adult in their LS or a general friend who could aid the person in making the correct decision if it gets “weird”.
Q. Do you even care because it’s a feature in the PlayOnline viewer that you have never and will never use?
Two sides to this…
A. No, I don’t. People who aren’t allowed to chat about these kinds of things in POL have hundreds of other places they could do the same thing.
B. Yes, I would. IF I had kids who played and they stumbled upon some of the terrible things that could be found there I would be horrified. Hate to admit it but there are some f***ed up people who play online games in general.
Personally the only time I’ve ever used the chat rooms is during the wait time after maintenance for the servers to get back up.
> “If the Rated R chat moved into the game, they’d be shouting those chat room titles and could be reported and banned and never let back in the game.”
I’m not so sure. First off, the only thing that’s really “public” is the chat room title, you have to actually go into the room for the really objectionable stuff to happen. It’d be the equivalent of “r u horny? pst” shouts in Whitegate. Nobody has “conversations” like that in a truly public way, because public chat is open to public commentary/critique/etc. (“You two call that cyber? Feh!” “Screenshot! This is going on BG!”)
Beyond that, the only thing that restricts content is the POL Member agreement, which says you can’t use POL (or POL games like FFXI) to do illegal things (e.g. exploit minors or do things that are “obscene” in the “Miller test” sense) (IANAL). But all in all, if one POL user finds something another POL user is saying objectionable, the GMs will treat it just as they do in FFXI: they’ll point out the foul language filters built into to the Viewer (off by default, I believe, but still present), and they’ll point out the blacklisting features in the Viewer, but so long as no actual harassment is involved, all they’ll say is “user disputes aren’t our problem.” Don’t forget that the Viewer and FFXI were developed around the same time, and the same or similar tools available in FFXI to deal with other players you don’t like are also available in the Viewer.
> “IF I had kids who played and they stumbled upon some of the terrible things that could be found there I would be horrified.”
S-E’s rule is “Thou shallt not use POL below the age of 13. Now, think back to your 13-year-old self, take a look at the chat room titles in the screenshot, and, beyond anything else, do you think you wouldn’t be able to figure out what was going on there? Or do you truly think it’s possible for your teenaged self to literally accidentally stumble upon anything in there unawares? “19MsksF(sexual),” one way or another, isn’t exactly going to attract the kind of people who are fans of Hannah Montana or the Jonas Bros. There’s no bait-and-switch involved (beyond the usual “It’s a dude!” nonsense).
I’m not asking “Would you have been interested in partaking?” The questions are “Would you have not known what was going on?” and “If you didn’t know what was going on, would you have gone in to find out?” I’ve actually hung out in FFXI with a girl near the minimum age to play and she actively avoided such things like this when she saw it, usually labeling the people who partake in it as “creepy” or “scary.” And when she did see some slang or abbreviation she didn’t understand, she asked someone she trusted because, if nothing else, she didn’t want to look silly or stupid for not knowing (something most teenagers fear).
Think about the example here. He felt free enough to ask his parents for their permission to meet with her; he promptly ignored them when they said “no,” but that doesn’t sound like she tried to pressure him into keeping it a secret (if she even knew he was a minor, which she claims she didn’t). He also knew what they would be meeting for, because he knew it was something serious enough to ask permission for, and the details he gave his parents were enough for them to want to say “no.” No windowless vans or offers of free candy were involved. It’s hard to argue that the minor in question didn’t know exactly what he was getting himself into, and did it voluntarily.
The scarier thing for me is that the adult here traveled thousands of miles to a foreign country, alone, to meet someone from the internet. If he really did lie about his age and get away with it, he could have lied about much more (“I won’t bring friends!” “I won’t have a gun!” “I won’t steal your passport!”).
In my opinion, “Think of the children!!111!!” doesn’t make much sense here, since by the time they’re 13 they can already think of themselves, and most teenagers aren’t interested in it and won’t go looking for it. Statutory rape cases where the age difference is more than ~4 years typically involve force, deception or abuse of authority, because generally minors aren’t interested in someone twice their age and it takes something malicious to compel them. And unless you’re totally ignoring S-E when they repeatedly insist that you educate your kids on not giving out personal information on the internet, such exploiters will never have the power to do anything malicious, at least not anything that can’t be dealt with by the tools S-E provides.
On the topic of the chat rooms seeing use… they see a LOT of use during maintenance
OK, I was just going by the linked-to article before. I’ve been reading other articles on the incident and apparently she did get rather stalky in the run-up to this, having attempted a meeting back in February ’09. And apparently I was wrong about the TX age of consent.
I still have mixed feelings about this whole thing, though. He may have been manipulated for sex, but he was also manipulated with sex, which, let’s face it, is something that most people his age, boy or girl, are very interested in; a windowless van, but it’s free sex rather than free candy that he was offered. So there’s still no cut-and-dry exploitation, nothing that any sort of third-party could hope to monitor for.
The woman’s main problem is that she couldn’t wait another year or two for everything to be legal. The parents’ problem is that they didn’t think to talk to law enforcement last year when they first learned about the relationship. The boy’s problem is that he’ll end up learning about love versus lust a few years before most of us did.
This all feels more like some sort of Greek tragedy than a real, malicious crime to me. I’m still not seeing a need for torches and pitchforks; nobody but the boy, the woman, and the boy’s parents could have hoped to do anything to stop this. Again, the parents had enough information to get law enforcement involved but didn’t think to until the boy finally disappeared.
OK, I’ve written way too much on this as it is. /muted
I personally think the POL chat situation is pretty funny. That being said, I’d kind of a terrible person, so you should take that into account.
I didn’t actually know that the POL chat rooms were used outside of for talking to GMs/Tech Support and by people being bored and chatting about wildly offensive things and kicking each other from the chat rooms arbitratrily during maintenance. They’re kind of like waiting on hold with your ISP while cursing at your cat for peeing on the rug.
Well, I think we can all agree that the viewer never developed any luster. If it’s any testament at all, I do use the chatrooms one out of every couple version updates when I’m too restless to get off of the computer.
Im from Barrie, if i see this kid im gonna laugh at him…
I’ve honestly never found much use for the POL Viewer other than an 30 second obstacle between me and FFXI. I have never used the chatrooms, I have never used any support or special features it offers, and I have never touched Tetra Master. It might be a bit more interesting if SE actually put effort into it.
Now seeing that it’s causing problems, and possible complaints from parents, I think it should be left out of any future plans SE has for its online community. Also the removal of the chatrooms from the viewer wouldnt be such a bad idea either, at the very least, have someone moderate them. After seeing this, I actually went to go see it for myself, and it was just as bad as the post, if not a bit worse. I’d have to say this sort of thing is making SE look irresponsible.
Yea other then the chat, all the good stuff LIKE THE OTHER GOOD GAMES, were limited to the Japanese Community, ask DJPlaeskool hes played the games that were available I think. SE only gave us TETRA MASTER, wuptydooo.
I find it extremely juvenile to “hook up” through online games. More often than not, the female player will be male. Whenever I find people looking for dates in-game… I tell them to go get a real girlfriend.
As far as the story above is concerned… That woman should be ashamed of herself and hopefully soon we’ll be seeing her on the sexual predator listing. Such a vile crime.