Final Fantasy 14 can be a very social game if you really want it to be. It's an MMO, which means you're constantly bumping into other players in small groups, and you can dive into tons of different forms of content that have entire communities built around them. I've made some very good friends on Final Fantasy 14, and there are countless stories of people meeting their significant others there as well.
That being said, it's probably best not to see Final Fantasy 14 as a place to actually look for romance, which is why the idea of FF14 Tinder has always been scoffed at and scoffed at by the vast majority of the game's player base. That hasn't stopped some from trying though, as a new dating app called Aetherlove is causing a bit of a stir in Final Fantasy 14 circles.
Aetherlove gets all the hate from FF14 players
If you're curious, AetherLove is basically an in-game plugin that you can install and set up, which works much like Tinder. You create a profile for your character, you set preferences for people you want to talk to, and then you swipe left and right on the profiles you're given in an attempt to match. If you match, you'll talk to each other privately, and AetherLove guarantees that it's “100% secure.”
Unfortunately, the way AetherLove has gone about promoting itself has caused some problems. For starters, the person or people behind the plugin have paid for official advertising via Twitter, which is quite possibly the most blatant violation of Final Fantasy 14's Terms of Service you can get outside of maybe verbally abusing someone in-game.
For context, mod use in Final Fantasy 14 as a whole is against the Terms of Service. However, you can't stop modders, no matter how much you want to, so it's been something that director Yoshi-P has deliberately let slip for a while. It's only until mod usage becomes a problem that Square Enix steps in, as we've seen before in the case of Mare Synchronous, a plugin that allowed people to see the mods that other people were using. Basically, if you keep quiet about mods, Yoshi-P lets it slide.
Advertising a plugin on social media as a brand would be an official product is not silent on mods, and now many people are worried that this will add fuel to a potential crackdown on mods that could happen if things get even more out of hand.
Then you also have the absurdity of the app itself. Not only does it appear to be very heavily developed with AI, as all plugin ads feature AI-generated images, but the app itself is also filled with bullboys and heavily modded catgirls. There also seem to be reports of users stealing gposer, catfishing as other players. It really does sound like Tinder.
I'm not going to yuck anyone's yum here, but the whole thing is essentially a giant red flag that will almost certainly be picked up by Square Enix, and is filled with people showing off how many mods they use. If there's one thing that's going to make Square Enix go after Dalamud, it's more and more plugins like this, so you can see why the Final Fantasy 14 community is up in arms right now.
- Released
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August 27, 2013
- ESRB
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Teen/Blood, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence, In-Game Purchases, User Interaction
- Engine
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Originally the Crystal Tools engine, but currently a custom engine using parts of the Luminous Engine.
