Microsoft is banning ‘Final Fantasy 14’ players for promoting guilds

Final Fantasy 14 players are reportedly being banned by Microsoft for using the phrase “free company”.

• READ MORE: Gathering and crafting: why taking a break in ‘Final Fantasy 14’ is a delight

In Final Fantasy 14, a free company is a player-operated organisation within the game, similar to a guild in other online titles. Players can only be a member of one free company at a time, with each company limited to 512 members.

As well as the community aspect of being part of a free company, members also get access to shared rewards, group buffs and company housing.

To help the system, Square Enix has also created an official community finder tool, which helps players find and join the free company of their choosing via Final Fantasy 14’s messenger service. Alternatively, players can visit a free company’s estate and apply ingame. Another popular way of recruiting members to a free company is to advertise in busy cities and endgame hubs.

Several Xbox players have also utilised the Looking For Group section of the official messageboards to find a free company since the game came to the platform last month. However, this has resulted in month-long bans.

oh my god xbox players in FFXIV are being banned by xbox for mentioning “free company”

— Jason (@envinyon) March 30, 2024

Taking to Reddit, one user wrote: “I am an Xbox player here and I have just gotten banned by Xbox because they believe that “Free Company” is solicitation. I filed an appeal and that got denied. I have no idea what else to do.”

The message in question read: “We are currently recruiting for a new Free Company that accepts anyone! Please have Discord because we have PC Players!” and earned the player a 61 day ban of their entire Microsoft account.

Another player reportedly got banned for a similar post, while others have pointed out that Microsoft’s “aggressive” word filter is even blocking phrases like “harvest dance” due to the letters s,t and d appearing consecutively.

Earlier this year, Baldur’s Gate 3 players were also caught out by Microsoft’s auto-moderation tools.

Several Xbox players were banned after captured NSFW clips were automatically uploaded to public servers, with Larian Studios’ director of publishing Michael Douse calling the whole affair “annoying and uncool”. Microsoft eventually started rolling back the bans after facing pressure from Larian.

In other news, Pokémon has won April Fools’ day 2024 by announcing a Champion Tournament for Sleep.