FFXIV is killing itself and the community is cheering it on
Heya! So, Square Enix banned Mare Synchronus today. Unless you're terminally online, you probably have no idea what that sentence meant. Let me explain.
So! FFXIV is a really popular MMO made by square enix, the guys that made all the Final Fantasy Games. It's also one of my favorite games of all time.
Problem is:
The Client you use to play the game sucks very very badly.
So, a couple years ago, some community members set out to fix that!
They invented Dalamud, which is a plugin loader for Final Fantasy 14. At last, the community could fix Squares insane design decisions.
More than four chat tabs! proper Dm's! Chat Logs that persist after logging out! Searching your inventory! Group Chats with unlimited members!
That, and a bunch of other incredibly basic features could finally be added thanks to the power of some really dedicated community members coming together to make the client less shit.
And... Square seemed to be totally fine with it!
Yay!
Everyone is happy.
Square gets to print money, the players get to enjoy playing the game.
Fast forward a while.
Someone made a mod loader:
It's called Penumbra.
Now, People can change how their characters look! They can add new emotes! They can change the look of their weapons!
And, it just gets displayed on the client side. Due to, yknow, the nature of how mods work.
And... Square seems totally fine with it!
Yay!
Again, everyone is happy.
Players get to, again, use it to make the game better.
Old gear gets retextured to no longer be in like 240p, Vieras get hats (because for some reason an entire playable race was unable to wear hats for multiple years), Hair styles get retextured, all the good stuff.
Anyways, long story short, someone creates Mare Synchronos.
Mare Synchronos lets you see the mods other players are using.
When you have it installed, and you give someone your code and they give you theirs, you can see what their character looks like with the mods they're using.
Apart from this being really damn impressive, it's also really cool!
It makes roleplaying way more interesting, it gives people a cool way to show off mods they made or downloaded to their friends, its just plain fun.
Square, again, does not seem to care.
Then. A couple years go by.
Fast forward to now, and square suddenly banned it.
Github repo is gone.
Servers are down.
And... People seem to be cheering them on?
The top comments on videos about this seem to just be mocking "those degenerate modders".
Let me restate: You had to explicitly download this mod.
Then, you had to enter a specific code in order to connect with someone, and you could only do it with their explicit consent.
But people are cheering the ban on.
Alright, let me explain why:
First up. People have no clue what Mare Synchronus actually is or does.
Well, the modders do. But most people still play ff unmodded.
A lot of the people rooting for the removal of mare seem to think that it's a mod loader.
it's not.
Second:
ERP. Alright, I'll let the cat out of the bag. The reason there's a sizeable number of people who wanted mare gone was because people were using it to basically have e-sex. Because FFXIV has a rather sizeable number of NSFW mods. So, add mod-sharing to that, and you can see where that goes.
Thing is, even if, for some reason, you are against consenting adults doing erotic roleplay in a videogame, this doesn't actually "fix" that.
As long as your game has some sort of way to communicate with other players, people will be horny on it. It's like, basically a natural law at this point. Mare just made that process slightly more enjoyable.
But, by taking down those "evil degenerates", they removed one of the most fun parts of FF. Because mods, believe it or not, are a really damn fun way to express yourself. The best part of Final Fantasy XIV, at least to me, has always been how social it is. I have been playing it for, probably a good 5000 hours by now, and most of that time was spent using it as a glorified chat room.
Existing in the world of ff14, talking to other people on there, it's fun. And mare was an extension of that. You could use it to show off fun dance mods, cool outfits...
But most importantly, it let you express yourself in ways the basegame just did not allow for.
In FFXIV, there's not much in the way of body-customization. Yeah, there's a muscle slider that doesn't really do anything, and a height slider that doesn't make much of a difference either. Essentially, there's precisely one body type. You get to be hot fantasy character A, and that's it.
But MMO's, i think, can be such an important tool for expressing yourself. At their best, they let you try out different personas, let you experiment with your identity. How you want to be seen, who you truly are. And sharing mods opened up so much in that regard.
Suddenly, you didn't need to be hot fantasy character A.
Your character could be a trans girl, a trans guy. You could have scars, tatoos, You could be really muscular, you could be chubby, you could be short, you could be freakishly tall. Basically, your body shape didn't need to be that of a generically attractive, brand-safe fantasy character.
And that fucking rocked. I never made much use of it, but it was awesome seeing my friends characters look the way they wanted to be seen. And I think it was really important to have that option for people, because otherwise some people just wouldn't see themselves represented.
Sure, you can make hot guys and hot girls in the character creator. But anything gender-nonconforming? Ehhh...? No, not really. You could wear a maid outfit, and that was about it. Nothing in the way of body customization, and when it came to clothes you aren't exactly spoiled for choice either. Not much room for femboys, enbies, or really anyone who doesn't strictly identify as either male or female. And like, we already had a solution for this, it was mare sync. But that's gone now. And that just sucks. Because while I have mostly moved on from the game, I'm sad for the people that are still playing and the people who might join in the future that could have discovered stuff about themselves, about their gender expression, about how they want others to see them, about who they want to be. Or the people who simply wanted a character that represented them, who maybe didn't have the body shape of a skinny anime character.