(Editor’s Note: this draft started off as solely about the drama in the Ultimate race to world first for Futures Rewritten. However, in the last week, a new plugin has caused a lot of very legitimate issues and so the back section of this post is all about PlayerScope and how Square Enix has boxed themselves in on the plugin issue!)

There was recently another world first race for Ultimate raiding in Final Fantasy XIV that saw a Japanese non-streaming team win, only to be outed as having used third-party tools and shamed. History often repeats itself! Obviously, this inspired the usual insipid hot takes and a minimal cycle of discourse, which was only really minimal because the US had a holiday weekend ongoing for Thanksgiving.

And like, we’ve been here before, and I’m going to talk about it, but I want to start by focusing on how Square Enix could actually solve this self-inflicted problem. Firstly, I say self-inflicted because the FFXIV team, around the ARR relaunch, had discussed delivering an addon API for the game, even discussing what methodology it might use (funnily enough, the frontrunner for the foundational tech and programming method was Flash of all things). They decided against providing that, instituted a blanket no-use policy for any third party tools, and then did not implement a way to tell if tools were being used. So, like with steroids in pro sports, third party tool usage is basically an IQ test for players – if you’re smart enough to not show them and not talk about them, you can use them with impunity. The only reason recent world races have been mired in controversy in this way is because the world first teams have all failed the IQ test.

So let’s talk about some options for how this becomes less of a discourse vector, with plenty of my opinion sprinkled in.

Status Quo (Addons Against TOS, No Anti-Cheat or Monitoring)

The first and most obvious option to me is that the status quo can be maintained. Why? Because it’s not actually that bad or big of an embarrassment. Sure, every Ultimate race it becomes a topic because that is when the subject is generally most visible, but Ultimate raiders are a minority of a minority of players, World First race watchers are themselves not a majority of the community, and so while it gets loud inside the room, the room itself discussing this topic isn’t really that big a chunk of the game’s fanbase. What’s more, there are benefits to Square Enix from maintaining things as-is.

If you look at mod repositories, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that the majority of FFXIV’s PC players use plugins of some sort, although validating those numbers as unique users would be a stretch at the same time. While the loudest and most annoying voices in the room complain about raid-focused tools, FFXIV’s plugin ecosystem has damn near everything, from RP addons, visual mod enablement, chat bubbles, and more all the way to an in-game music changer that can use any FFXIV music. A lot of what annoys me about the addon discussion is that everyone is high and mighty about TOS adherence while carving out their own exceptions for what they like to use, veiling it with grandstanding moralizing about what constitutes “cheating” and what types of tool use deserves to be scolded. But at the same time, the current policy is in many ways an okay-enough status quo, annoyances notwithstanding, and I’d wager that is a similar perspective to the one inside Squeenix HQ. Sure, raiders can reduce cognitive burden and modbeasts can put huge breasts and “Choke Me Daddy” collars on their characters, but then everyone is happy provided they can just shut the fuck up about using them.

Sure, to an extent, this isn’t perfect at the same time. Console players are a core constituency in FFXIV and they can’t use any of these things, so there is perhaps a question of what is fair and this means the discourse remains intact, like Ultimate raiders who clear in week 18 moralizing about how much more skilled they are even when a member of their team streams showing third party tools (I am referencing a specific person I deal with from time to time lol), but the current state of things isn’t actually all that bad. Outside of Ultimate races when people can soapbox about it, the volume of the discourse is low and players are largely free to do as they please, with the general view into the third party tool ecosystem being that a majority of used mods are visual or quality-of-life, while raiders tend to use more WoW-style raid helpers and quality of life or visual mods over the egregious stuff like Splatoon or open botting of their character. Of course, at the same time, we cannot know any of that with certainty, and perhaps there is an army of players botting and using telegraph revealers to bring themselves to all the titles and accolades possible, but given how few people end up clearing Ultimates and how small a percentage of players clear full Savage tiers, I think the view I’ve seen is fairly accurate.

But if it is a problem, other solutions exist…

TOS Remains, Anti-Cheat Added

I think this is the most likely if Squeenix opts to do anything at all. While Yoshi-P wavers about adding anti-cheat and discusses it like there would be legal hurdles (my guess is that revising the game’s TOS to include anti-cheat provisions would create an opt-out option that might result in players getting refunds or having some recourse to challenge the company, but I am not a lawyer much less knowledgeable about Japanese law), obviously games in Japan have anti-cheat and telemetry so I would wager, as a decided non-expert, that it would be possible.

So why is this not the option they go to after years of this back and forth?

Well, the thing that many addon enjoyers state, and I largely agree with, is that you would be surprised by the number and types of players that would simply stop playing FFXIV if they were banned for tool usage. Those Dalamud repo numbers, while difficult to extrapolate meaning from, do show that a surprisingly large number of players use plugins, and the vast, vast majority of those have nothing to do with raiding or easing difficult content. Anti-cheat would catch Reshade, whose TOS-compliance is predicated on a non-binding forum post from nearly 10 years ago. Anti-cheat would catch TexTools and all the visual mods that players use to customize beyond the game’s character choices. Anti-cheat carries no exceptions for what is allowed to interact with the game’s process – nothing. While it would catch pretty much everything that the repetitive tools discourse whines about so often, it would catch a wide net of other things too. Plugins are, like it or not, the backbone upon which entire scenes of the game are built. The RP and venue scene? Lots of addons there. Stuff that makes gathering and crafting workable like Teamcraft? Third party software that packet sniffs just like damage meters and boss mods.

If the game’s TOS remains as-is but anti-cheat is added that catches all the things people opine about so loudly, well, a lot of players who think their addons are just fine because they aren’t “cheating” are gonna get caught up in account actions, and then what? What comes after that is hard to predict. Some scenes within the game that sustain its active playerbase would be hit hard and might not come back – but that cannot be predicted with any real accuracy. My guess, as I noted above, is that a lot of these players would quit the game. If using your visual mods, venue mods, chat bubbles, music changers, and tradeskill helpers hit you with a ban, then a non-zero number of players using those things would stop playing the game regularly. I could see a lot of that audience coming back with clean installs for expansion launches and doing MSQ pushes, but the constant subscription base of the game would absolutely take a hit. It’s worth noting in this discussion that Square Enix is precarious too – not in immediate danger of going belly-up, but right now FFXIV is one of the only profit centers in the entire company and one of the only profit centers with an overall positive public perception, since gatcha games get bombastic side eye.

So adding anti-cheat could have some red tape, and even if added successfully under current TOS, would likely catch a pretty wide swath of players in account actions that might push the game to a bad place as a business, or might not, but would lead to a fair number of players having reduced enjoyment of it (and not just the raiders that everyone loves to pile on with this topic). Potentially problematic!

API Launched, Anti-Cheat Added

This is, and has always been, my personal gold standard solution to the “issue” posed here. While WoW’s world first race has its own problems and issues, it is generally accepted as a reasonable competition wherein no one contests how much the winning team deserved it, short of team pride or national/regional affiliation through parasocial fans. Sure, sometimes Scripe gets salty at Max when Liquid wins and the reverse when Echo wins, but no one really says a win is invalid, even given the WoW-specific headaches of the world first race (non-simultaneous tier launches per region and server maintenance schedules meaning multi-week races have a real potential for the NA teams to pull ahead as their raid week starts earlier). Quibbles aside and even without Blizzard’s explicit endorsement, the Mythic race to world first is regarded as a fair and level playing field for the most part, with the things that make it challenging completely out of the hands of the competitors (that damn release schedule).

Launching an addon API solves a lot of problems for FFXIV with plugins. At that point, theoretically, console players can get the same addons and support, Squeenix can tightly define what is allowed via the API, and then that means that things are reasonably equal across the playerbase. The piece of this I don’t necessarily like or want to advocate for is anti-cheat, however, that is the unspoken enforcer in the case of WoW too. WoW’s Warden system enforces what is allowed to interact with WoW’s game data and process, and combined with API changes and data availability to third party tools, Blizzard is able to both control what can be done with addons and also to take account actions on violations of policy without needing the idiot test self-report that FFXIV currently requires. If you want an objectively “clean” race to world first with acceptable parameters, that’s kind of the only way to get it. It would be a massive undertaking, make no mistake – creating an API that can span the entire breadth of platforms that FFXIV is supported on (PC, Mac, theoretically Linux via Steam Deck, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series S and Series X) is a tough endeavor, creating an API with parameters that the majority of players feel okay with is a massive undertaking in and of itself, and the process can have some hiccups (allowing console players to get addons would take some management of hosting, whether Square Enix has to host within the game or support a process for bringing addons into the game from outside in some form) – but I think the only way to completely level the playing field without any doubt is to make official support of a limited scope of addons a thing and then create an enforcement mechanism to ensure that players are in compliance with that limited scope. I guess that leaves a couple of options, one non-serious and a few more serious…

API Launched, No Anti-Cheat

This just wouldn’t work satisfactorily and is basically the status quo with more work. If you create an addon API, great, but if the core of the game remains as-is and there’s no detection of interference, then the entire existing plugin ecosystem can still exist undisturbed and the same complaints and problems would continue to exist, albeit with some teams using approved, API-restrained tools. As much as I, again, do not want to advocate in favor of anti-cheat, I think if you believe that plugins are a real problem for the game, the only way you can ever fully solve that is through client-side detection and protection.

Policed By The Race-Runners

The solution that a lot of people tend to gravitate towards at the moment is what Frosty of MogTalk has discussed – the race being policed by a neutral third party – but that has myriad issues of its own. Firstly, I generally like what I have seen of Frosty, but I also believe his efforts to insert himself into this as the “race-decider” is sort of self-serving for his channel. MogTalk’s race streams faced serious competition from more direct team streams and the Echo team stream, which brought WoW RWF production to FFXIV for the first time – team in a venue together, playing and updating in real time with slick camera views, multiple POVs, and little stream challenges and incentives spearheaded by hosts outside of the team. It was genuinely great and I think is part of what the future should hold for races in FFXIV as well. Perhaps not coincidentally, this race was also the first time Frosty really put his foot down, removing GRIND (the Japanese team who achieved world first while using plugins) from his stream’s leaderboard and refusing to acknowledge them as the world first, which was interesting given that a lot of the teams involved in the race pushed back slightly on that by still continuing to acknowledge GRIND as world first.

Here’s my take: I think the teams in the race should have the most say over what constitutes a legitimate world first kill, because they are the ones who know firsthand the effort, skill, and dedication it takes, and also the impact that tools can have on that race. I find it quite telling that so few of those players are unequivocally labeling GRIND as “cheaters” or invalid in the race while a large number of people who have never even unlocked an Ultimate, much less zoned into one, have stronger and more negative opinions towards GRIND.

In the wake of the news, Frosty put out two blog posts on MogTalk about the plugin situation, first proposing a gentleman’s agreement to a race with 0 plugins and no logging via ACT that required taking teams on their word that they weren’t using any tools at all, before coming out and saying that logging might be okay alongside ping mitigation tools like NoClippy and XIVAlexander after catching some flak. Part of this was that while shutting off logging has a valid use-case (ACT is the means by which logs are made but also the mechanism by which most trigger addons for boss mechanics get their packet data and provide an overlay for the game even though the teams would have to make their own triggers), it also sort of shuts out what most racers see as the most valid coverage of the race – the logs being uploaded to and validated by FFLogs, in service of creating a stream event that Frosty benefits from but the racers kind of don’t.

Provided Square Enix does not create an official event with rules and enforcement, the race to world first is always going to be a fan event. Hell, even in WoW where it is accepted and acknowledged by the developers, Blizzard does not step in to support directly and provides no real resources to the race or its participants. Given this, I think that trusting the teams in the race to dictate terms is always going to be better than someone outside the race or the viewers themselves, because…

The Fallacy of “Just Stream Your Prog” and What Third Party Tools Can and Cannot Do

The community discourse around FFXIV world races kinda pisses me off, and I think I’ve communicated that well in prior posts on the matter. It involves uninformed players spouting naive conceptions about how streaming is the cure to the plugin problem, people taking overly strong and excessively moralizing positions about what constitutes cheating, and low-tier Ultimate raiders spouting off how much better they are than the literal world first teams when they’ve barely escaped the first phase of the fight. And, mea culpa here, I’m a part of the problem too. I don’t raid Ultimate and while I’ve studied the fights a bit, my opinion is just one of those that likely doesn’t and shouldn’t mean much.

Most plugins and boss mods for FFXIV are overlays, generated and put on top of the game after the game itself processes its display calls. If you stream your FFXIV through most game capture options in streaming software, these tools simply do not show up, unless they inject into the process and tag along with the draw calls and display output of the game itself. Most addons that people are mad about do not do this, which means streaming your client is no proof at all of legitimacy. Granted, some of these tools are more obvious than others – stuff like auto-markers can be sort of unveiled just due to the speed of the marker assignments, and the zoom hacks that broke team UNNAMED in The Omega Protocol were obvious because it was way further out than the game’s camera settings ever possibly allows – but a vast, vast majority of the game’s tool ecosystem can be hidden on stream with minimal effort. What can get you is screenshots, which the game will catch plugins in because of how screenshots are captured by the client, or streaming monitor capture, which would then show what is in the full display view and thus unveil a lot of tools – but streaming by itself is nowhere near enough proof of innocence.

However, it’s also worth mentioning that, as with UNNAMED in TOP, what caught GRIND out this time was objectively silly and stupid. The plugin in question was Pixel Perfect, which unveils where your precise hitbox is in 3D space on screen – which, in FFXIV, is always the centermost pixel underneath your character. Does having this information reduce cognitive burden and make playing at a high level easier? Sure, there’s absolutely some benefit which is why anyone would use it in the first place. Does it confer so great an advantage that it is worth invalidating the hard work put in by GRIND? No, easily not. You still have to respond to that data at an extremely high level and there are so many other layers of things happening in gameplay at that moment that simply knowing where your character is considered to be by AoEs and mechanics with absolute certainty isn’t invalidating in the slightest. Winning the race with that data doesn’t suddenly mean you are a bad player who could never do it without that information, and I think arguing that it is a massive advantage shows a level of idiocy. Just like with zoom hacks in TOP, it eased one mechanic in one part of the fight that still required perfect execution for the rest of the fight, and even the easing effect could be argued against in that TOP case (such a zoom-out means seeing your character position would be substantially harder). In the case of Futures Rewritten Ultimate, it’s even sillier – arguing there’s no point to world racing if you defame yourself as a cheater and the “cheat” in question is a dot that offers an unnecessary level of precision makes the whole discussion sound really fucking dumb. If you think knowing the precise hitbox location is “playing the game for you,” then you’re a moron, sorry not sorry. I would challenge people who make this idiotic argument to download the tool and go get a FRU clear then, since apparently it’s so easy to do with that one tool!

Where I do have some measure of respect for the discussion is in the unknowns – if they got outed with this one tool, then what else could be hidden that we weren’t accidentally shown? That is a valid approach to take to this dilemma – one that, I feel, extends the validity of the argument for an anti-cheat in the game, at least. What is obvious is that the current status quo isn’t working here in this regard because “just stream it to show you’re not using tools” actually doesn’t unveil jack shit and the people who get the pitchforks out over simple dumb plugins like Pixel Perfect don’t exactly make a compelling or rational argument against plugins when they try to argue that a fucking dot to show your location invalidates hundreds of hours of hard pulls and progress. Speaking of…

The “Cheating” Discussion

By the judicious use of quotation marks in this post on this topic, you might reasonably suspect that I find calling plugin use “cheating” to be dubious, and that is correct (the direct statements displaying disdain for the topic probably also helped convey that, I hope!). I speak on this every time this topic comes up, so this may be a rehash, sorry, but here goes.

Within the context of the current state, sure, plugins are strictly against TOS and constitute a TOS violation. The most ironclad case against plugins is literally that, no elaboration required. If you break TOS, you’re subject to whatever Square Enix finds appropriate as an enforcement action. What I find frustrating is this moralizing high ground of how using plugins in the world first race constitutes “cheating.” The unwritten part of the race to world first is that most teams are using plugins, whether they will admit it or not. One person at a minimum is logging fights through ACT, which is against TOS and can provide additional information, some streamers play on cross-region teams on faraway data centers and somehow still have perfect dual weaving of oGCDs which would absolutely require NoClippy and/or XIVAlexander, and while there are almost certainly individual players per team playing with a clean install of the game and no tools at all, in many cases it only takes one person with them to confer many of the benefits to the team writ large. I bring this up because it is worth saying that in a race such as world first raiding, what constitutes cheating is ultimately predicated on social acceptance. To an extent, we all take on faith that teams are not using plugins as an audience, and to the teams inside the race, they often take it on faith that everyone is using some form of tool assistance. To Square Enix, tool-assisted clears are invalid, but to the racers themselves? It would seem to not be the case based on the commentary around this topic from major world-first raiders.

My personal perspective is this – in a race scenario where the idea of cheating means something, how it is defined matters and the current status quo takes a blind-eye approach so only teams dumb enough to out themselves get flak for it. Based on what most of the teams say, however, those who are outed are far from alone in tool utilization. Cheating only can really apply meaningfully if we assume that something is not widely accepted as used, because the terms of the race are largely about social proof of prowess, and that’s why I believe that the difference in opinions between the mainstream viewership of the race and the actual racers matters. To the racers, getting there first is still evidence of skillful play and mechanic solving, and in my eye, that’s sufficient proof of mastery. Outside the confines of the world first race, I think that whining about cheating is idiotic because there’s not an official leaderboard or true competition – you’re doing Ultimate largely for yourself, to test your play skill, master a difficult marathon raid fight, and to receive a title and weapon glamour reward, and use of tools doesn’t “cheat” someone else out of a win because the game is not zero-sum like that. Sure, if we were discussing PvP or if there was an official leaderboard in the game that acknowledged clears, it would recontextualize the discussion in a lot of ways, but it isn’t PvP and such a leaderboard does not officially exist. In that context, I loathe the use of “cheating” and the moralizing tone the discussion takes from certain players because it is pure rhetoric so far detached from the reality of the situation – there’s no real provable harm done to anyone and so it only breaks what a portion of the audience considers to be acceptable social proof and the game’s TOS. And that isn’t nothing – the TOS is obviously enforceable and the social proof matters in the world first race – but the difference of opinion between the upper echelon players actually racing and those watching feels significant and worth noting to me. If we want a true level playing field, at the very least an anti-cheat would be needed to show that happening without any doubts.

Ultimately, if tools convey such a huge advantage, then surely you or I could clear an Ultimate with enough tools, right? Why doesn’t that happen? Because even tool-assisted, clearing an Ultimate still requires the highest degree of skillful play the game demands of players and reaching that level of skill expression is far from trivial. Even looking a step down in the content hierarchy, Savage clear rates aren’t that high either, and tool support with triggers and such are far more available for it. Socially, sure, you can call it cheating, but doing so bends the meaning of the word in a way that is not evidenced by the results, and I find the weird moral grandstanding odd when the topic is playing a video game. It is valid and legitimate for you to not like or want to use such tools, but that doesn’t invalidate the hard work put in by world first teams that get caught using them or the ones that use them without getting caught (and obviously the teams that truly clear plugin-free stand on their own). If there was consistency, I’d be less irritated by this point, but so many people carve out exceptions for tools like Reshade, even though Reshade has been used in recent memory to make a Savage fight easier by creating contrast that isn’t in the visual design of the fight – so a hitbox pixel is cheating, but being able to color AoE telegraphs differently to expose them to a player more reliably isn’t? That kind of shifting target of what constitutes cheating is where I find objection – and if you stand consistently to the idea that third party tools of any sort are cheating, well, fair enough, but I also would disagree on that front based on the social proof that those doing the content adhere to.

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In the future, Ultimate races will continue to be exactly like this unless something changes. That isn’t even to say anything has to change – by and large, short of the weird discourse cycles about plugins each time, the Ultimate race and state of the plugin ecosystem of the game are mostly fine. If you believe there is a problem and that addons and tools must be stopped, then unfortunately there’s no way to get there without game-side changes being made, most of which require an anti-cheat or some form of client-side detection of process meddling. No amount of finger-wagging, disapproval, or public shame is going to stop teams from using tools when the actual penalty for doing so isn’t that severe (and ironically, the worst penalty comes from other players harassing the teams, which happened to such an extent to UNNAMED after TOP that they deleted their characters and quit the game). My continuing advocacy, for as much as it counts, is that the game needs an addon API and anti-cheat, to define what is allowed and to put up walls to stop other activities outside of that range from happening. Until such a time as we get that, or at least some lesser variant like just anti-cheat, the game will continue to have this hazy space around the raiding race that will allow teams to use tools for assistance and only get caught if they’re stupid enough to out themselves, with that same hazy space being used by some players to establish a flimsy moral highground. While the game can likely endure this, it is very annoying and I hope for change.

Late-Breaking Update: The Role of Plugins and Square-Enix in Stalking (Yes, Really)

A new plugin has breached the news cycle in 2025, taking advantage of something that Square Enix patched into the game and the haphazard way in which it was handled. The addon, called PlayerScope, allows you to track other players to alts and link characters to a single player, exists because of a lazy loophole that Square Enix added. In order to make account-wide blacklisting work in FFXIV, the Square Enix developers made it so that your accountID, the database identifier for your player account, is stored in the client and scrapeable – meaning that this data is indeed available to other players. PlayerScope scrapes this data and uses it to link players to all their characters, with no consent for this identification from the scraped party. The current opt-out process from the plugin developer, who seems to be a scummy person (just my opinion!), is to go to their Discord and request an opt out – which, if you are observant, means that you would then be effectively providing your Discord user information and linking it to an FFXIV account, thus increasing the trackable data on you that is in the plugin’s database. (It looks like this may have changed recently, as there is an opt-out form on the plugin’s Github page, but it just explains to add a tag to your Lodestone so it is unclear how this would actually work.)

Square Enix already has a bad reputation in FFXIV for how stalking concerns are addressed, in that they largely aren’t – you can remove someone from your friendlist but that doesn’t remove you from their list, whispers and in-game behavior has to cross a pretty far line before GMs will take action, and some forms of in-game stalking and harassing are largely considered okay by both the developers and a large section of players – the raiders of team UNNAMED from the TOP zoomhack scandal were harassed out of FFXIV largely by players following them into duties, sending harassing tells and generally being dickheads to them – which was categorized by many as a victory over the evil, criminal cheaters, and not as a boundary-pushing act of harassment out of proportion to the “crime” they committed.

PlayerScope highlights the problem with Square Enix’s approach to plugins in FFXIV in a huge way. They can’t detect it, so they won’t action it unless people talk about it, it highlights and exacerbates already problematic behavior within the FFXIV community that is poorly enforced in the first place, and because of a lazy deployment of a new feature, Square Enix can’t really pull back the reins at this point. The data on accountIDs is out and now the worst players in the community know how to weaponize this data to harass and intimidate – and your only offered recourse to opt-out is to provide more information that makes it even easier to find you both inside and outside of the game. If an addon API existed, they could have done the lazy fix they used without it being as big and controversial. If they had anti-cheat, they could detect this code running and scraping for info and then do something to ban and action the perpetrators, and if the team at Square Enix really wanted to do valuable work for the fans, they’d have an addon API coupled with anti-cheat and also mixed with not doing this shit-ass lazy hack “implementation” for such a feature in the first place!

The further problem here is that Square Enix has, through prior action, painted themselves into a corner on enforcement here. You can’t really fix the accountID problem without new code and new accountIDs for everyone. How likely are they to do this? I’ll give you a guess…it’s zero percent likely. They’ve talked so much about how adding anti-cheat is this task they don’t want to undertake because of trust and legal issues, but if they don’t implement it now, they can’t catch anyone using such tools to harass their fellow players. If they implement anti-cheat anyways, which they probably should (I don’t like it but it is what it is), then they betray the trust of people who talked them up for not using it and will then have to confront the true scope of the plugin scene – which is likely much larger than they believe it to be – and make decisions about how to proceed that will likely be difficult. If you enforce the TOS evenly, then everyone from stalkers to chat bubble users gets slapped, which is going to drive unhappiness and also let the stalkers off easy as they can slink away pretending they were just using innocent QoL plugins. If they don’t then add some measure of addon API or support for limited plugins, there is a portion of the playerbase (and I would wager most are not raiders, btw) that stop playing.

All of this is amplified by how truly unwilling Square Enix seems to be to address even the most basic issues with their code, implementation, and ideology around third party tools. They’ll bleat endlessly about how difficult and taxing it would be to add a new feature until a plugin author clowns them for it and then they implement it without acknowledging the past remarks. In Endwalker, the dev team insisted that adding a flag to items like minions and mounts you already collected would be too taxing on the game and systems because of how the code worked, but a Dalamud plugin came out that did exactly that at no cost in terms of resources and within a patch cycle, suddenly the game itself could do it with no problems or warnings about processing burden or server time. If they’re too lazy to add a fucking checkmark to collected items until they get clowned for it, how can players get through to them about something like account security and the use of account identifiers as scrapeable information?

Basically, in the time since I drafted this post, the chickens of Square Enix’s poor practices have come home to roost – grey-area enforcement of rules on plugins leading to truly nasty tools that only serve to further harassment that can only exist because of lazy, poorly thought-through implementation of account identifiers as a publicly-available datapoint, with no clear way forward that doesn’t require them breaking their own positions in at least a few ways to ensure player safety and comfort or making a decision to keep the status quo that allowed this to happen, allowing it to continue happening with no clear recourse to remedy the situation. Oh boy!