These Final Fantasy 14 mercenaries have taken their advertisements to the Fellowship Finder, an in-game tool that can be used to discover and join Fellowships. Since the updated Prohibited Activities Policy specifically banned these advertisements within the Party Finder, these tricky players have found a loophole that allows them to continue advertising–at least, for now.
RELATED: Blizzard Co-Lead Takes Part in World of Warcraft Raid Boost Run
Fellowships in Final Fantasy 14 are a relatively new social organization tool that arrived with the first major patch of the critically-acclaimed Shadowbringers expansion. Unlike Free Companies, the game’s analogue to guilds, and Linkshells, special in-game chat channels, Fellowships are low-commitment social message boards where like-minded players can get together from any server in their data center to coordinate events and share ideas. However, the systems for searching and interacting with Fellowships are flawed, leading most players to rely on Free Companies, Linkshells, or outside programs like Discord to organize their communities instead.
The practice of raid boosting is as old as the MMORPG genre itself. What’s worse, it and RMT often go hand in hand, as people seeking to buy clears of difficult content often buy in-game currency with real money to do it. Games like World of Warcraft combat it by creating a legal version of RMT so they might benefit from it at every end of the spectrum. On the other hand, FF14 opposes RMT primarily via warnings, bans, and restrictions on free trial accounts to prevent botting and advertisements from clogging up its players’ spaces.
Players were almost unanimously glad to see Final Fantasy 14 crack down on RMT and raid boosting, and are understandably annoyed to find the advertisements have simply moved to Fellowship Chat. These tools, which are meant to help players both old and new connect and play with one another, are clogged to the brim with advertisements, making it impossible to use them as they were intended to be used. Though the Fellowship Finder is not as frequently used as the Party Finder, it seems inevitable that FF14 will come for these clever mercenaries next.
Some players think the best solution for this problem is to axe the Fellowship system entirely. The Fellowship Finder already had botters, RMT, and raid boosters in it; the Party Finder crackdown merely exacerbated the issue to critical levels. However, these sorts of players are nothing if not persistent. If Final Fantasy 14 did remove the Fellowship system–which is still used by some people, despite its issues–raid sellers would simply find another way to conceal their trade and continue the long war between RMT and FF14.
Final Fantasy 14 is available now on PC, PS4, and PS5. The Endwalker expansion launches on November 23.
MORE: Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker Housing Lottery Explained
