Square Enix is putting its foot down once again when it comes to modding in Final Fantasy 14. The creator behind Mare Synchronos—a player-made plugin for synchronizing and sharing appearance mods between FF14 players—is shutting the three-year-old project down after apparently receiving a cease and desist order from Square Enix. It's not the first mod to catch Square's ire this year, but its latest demand certainly seems like an escalation.
The tool's creator, DarkArchon, announced his decision to end Mare after he "received a legal inquiry concerning the project" and reviewed his options with counsel. The plugin is easily one of FF14's biggest in terms of both scope and popularity, as glamour mods are among some of the most popular player-made changes in FF14. It's an awfully big scene, and the Mare Synchronos Discord has just over 200,000 users at the time of writing.
While Mare isn't the main mechanism for adding things like modded hairstyles, outfits, and other visual changes to FF14, it is the tool for sharing those changes between users in-game. Using the plugin required a suite of other add-ons to work, in addition to completing a registration and verification process through Discord and FF14's Lodestone.
DarkArchon has already closed new user registration, and has removed the client, server, and API repositories. So if you were looking to try it out before tomorrow, you're out of luck. As for anyone hoping to have one last hoorah with the mod, DarkArchon gave a specific deadline:
"The server will continue to run until Friday, August 22, 2025 5:00 AM, after that, the server will shut down, and the main repository will be removed as well. Enjoy your last doomsday party."
This doesn't put an end to FF14 players modding their appearance, but it does effectively kill the easy way to see whatever outfits your buddies have put together. The game was filled with players modding their appearances long before Mare launched in 2022, but those client-side changes had no way to sync between users before DarkArchon's mod provided an intermediary.
If you've never ventured into the realm of forbidden FF14 magics, think of Mare as an extra (and unofficial) friendlist with special permissions. Friends with modding benefits. You could upload your character's modded appearance through the plugin, then add a friend (also using Mare) to your sync group. Anyone in the group could see your mods, and you could see theirs.
Before everyone flocked to the social plugin, players would often swap mods if they wanted their appearance reflected in a friend's client, then go through the ordeal of installing those files. It was clunky, tedious, and required a lot of extra effort to change just one user at a time. Mare circumvented all of that, instantly changing your Warrior of Light for groups of people.
So are mods in FF14 a no-no, or not?
From the beginning, Final Fantasy 14 has always had a strict no third-party tools rule in its terms of service agreement. And just like every other ToS in existence, players mostly used the legal jargon as suggested dos and don'ts. Depending on the crime, the rules felt negotiable.
Square Enix didn't do much to help draw the line, either. For years, the team wagged a finger at some third-party add-ons while ignoring others. There were occasional instances of bans for in-game mentions or occasional smite over raid races, but the community mostly policed itself. Director and producer Naoki Yoshida clearly didn't approve of any add-ons, but as long as everyone quietly played with their toys, Square Enix was (sort of) chill about it.
It's certainly more heavy-handed in issuing punishments for some mods now, but Square got serious when the PlayerScope mod rolled into the scene earlier this year with a creepy stalker toolkit. Yoshida promised in later livestreams that the team was taking action against invasive add-ons like it, and eventually PlayerScope's creator took the mod down after Square Enix issued a cease and desist.
That's the incredibly brief version of where it all came to a head, and not all modding sins are equal, even if the FF14 ToS treats them as such. A social tool like Mare is clearly quite different from PlayerScope, which could be used for nefarious purposes. But both may look like a security risk to Square Enix.
Mare's shutdown is a real bummer for the players involved in FF14's creative modding scene, and a blow to the social aspect of the MMO. As for the bigger picture, I have to wonder where the line is drawn now and whether Square Enix's crackdown on third-party tools will end here. Perhaps this was to be expected, given the nature of Mare. The community has played it fast and loose with the rules for a decade, I don't expect that to end here.
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