Some weird stuff is bound to happen whenever you get enough people together in a virtual space. Naturally Final Fantasy XIV, as one of the most popular online games around (not to mention a personal favorite), is home to no small amount of weird behavior. I’m not using “weird” as a kind of moral judgment, just as an adjective for things I wouldn’t expect to see.
Cat girls in bathing suits dancing in line with a crowd of onlookers? Not weird at all. Large, burly men dressed in maid outfits or pig costumes? I see them every day. Virtual nightclubs wherein players connect to a discord server to dance the night away and drink imaginary drinks while engaging in erotic roleplaying? A little strange, in my opinion, but I’m not here to yuk anyone else’s yum. One of those virtual nightclubs using in-game logos and assets alongside mods on billboards advertising for a “Summer Bash”? …yeah, ok, that’s weird enough to get my attention.
There’s a lot going on in that one little sentence, especially if you aren’t familiar with Final Fantasy XIV’s community. Rain, the Free Company (FFXIV’s guild equivalent) behind the billboards, is one of the more well-known destinations for erotic roleplaying (ERP) on the Balmung server, which is widely regarded as the server where most ERP takes place.
It’s worth noting that ERP has been tolerated in the past by FFXIV’s development team, though the game’s producer has asked in the past for players not to participate in ERP publicly. The billboard doesn’t promote or list ERP in any way, I sincerely doubt it could and still go up, but since ERP takes place at these events, there is some concern that Square Enix could use this to crack down on this kind of activity.
A larger issue is the use of Final Fantasy XIV’s logo and in-game assets on the billboard. Rain most definitely did not get permission to use any copyrighted material. Even if Rain did seek such approval, their use of 3rd-party mods for the clothing and character poses on the billboard would have kept that permission from being granted. Third-party mods are against Final Fantasy XIV’s terms of service, but their use has been something of a “gray area” in practice. Mods exist to change the appearance of clothing and character models, and parsing mods exist for high-end raiding, but as long as players keep the effects of those mods to themselves, there are usually no consequences. There are concerns the billboard’s use of mods could be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back, causing Square Enix to take a more aggressive stance on the issue.
The response from Final Fantasy XIV players has been massive, though likely not in the way Rain’s organizers hoped for. Crowds of players have parked their largest mounts in front of Rain’s nightclub, symbolically blocking the entrance (players can walk through one another in Final Fantasy XIV). Players with certain mounts have been spamming their loudest, most visually intrusive special actions, like tanks firing explosive rounds and giant dogs barking. Again, none of this is doing any actual damage, but these forms of protest are certainly getting their point across.
The large-scale visual obstruction carried on into the event itself. I attempted to navigate the now-infamous party, but the sheer number of players present made it almost impossible to parse what was happening. Rotating my camera caused other players to pop in and out as the game attempted to render the enormous crowd. My chat box scrolled non-stop from the moment I set virtual foot in the residential district. My few attempts to stop the scroll and read revealed the crowd was predominantly present to make jokes and shout memes and catchphrases, with a very small number (at least that I could see) still angry. As an outsider, it’s hard for me to call the controversial promotion ineffective. The crowd was the largest I’ve seen in one place in Final Fantasy XIV, and no one can say the billboards didn’t get attention.
As of writing, the billboards have been taken down, and the discord server has gone private, as have the Twitter accounts of many individuals involved in the advertised event. No in-game punishments have been handed down.
