During the latest Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Letter from the Producer Live broadcast, Square Enix created some controversy while showing a "looking for group" in game message board designed to let players advertise their parties and facilitate the recruitment process for dungeons and other activities.

One of the comments displayed in the mock up shown during the livestream (you can check it out at the bottom of the post) included the wording "PS3お断り" ("PS3 Okotowari", that basically means "PS3, No thanks").

That reflects a rather nasty habit of some PC players to exclude PS3 players because their loading times are higher, or because playing with a controller is seen as less responsive (the funny thing is that it really isn't, but this is a sad heritage from Final Fantasy XI and from the previous version of FFXIV, that didn't have the new controller UI).

Yesterday UI Lead Designer Hiroshi Minagawa issued a statement officially apologizing for the "offensive wording" included in the mock up.

Minagawa-san also specified that, in order to avoid this to happen in the actual game when the feature will be implemented, the development team is considering the inclusion of some kind of filtering to make sure that it's not possible to include discriminatory messages like the one displayed.

Personally, having played Final Fantasy XI and XIV extensively, I'm quite used to this kind of things, and didn't even notice it at first (I don't squint that much when I watch a livestream), but I can definitely see why some people weren't happy to see it.

It's quite funny, though, that the message was shown as written by someone named like Final Fantasy's grumpiest protagonist, Cloud Strife.