How do you feel about dataminers? If you’re within the Final Fantasy XIV community, you likely know that datamining is against the terms of service. That hasn’t stopped folks from digging in to the game files and showing off what they’ve found, naturally, but that activity has reportedly drawn some account bans and forced the FFXIV datamining community to go to ground.
The first instance of a dataminer’s banning was a player by the name of Icarus Twine, who received a letter much like this one that explains the ban. Other dataminers have reportedly been targeted by Square Enix, all of whom have shared what they’ve found. As a result of this ban wave, the data mining channel of the FFXIV subreddit Discord server is being shut down in order to protect its visitors. “We would continue to allow access to the data mining channel, but we cannot in good faith allow people to put their service accounts on the line. Should Square Enix change their position on this matter, we would be glad to allow community members to once again provide it to you,” reads the announcement.
Not only is the data mining Discord channel being shuttered, but usual places to find datamined information are apparently going to go dark as well. “If you want information, you’ll have to look outside of Reddit for it because SE is apparently poking around everywhere they can in order to enforce their ToS on people who share mild model updates to 3+ year old content,” warns one Redditor’s post. “If you have any kind of modded or datamined info up on your Gfycat account, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, or anywhere else online that could be tracked to your character. Hide or delete that stuff!”
