On August 22, 2025, the mod Mare Synchronos
for Final Fantasy XIV was shut down, causing an uproar in the game’s community – including review bombing on Steam. Now the developer of the mod speaks out in an interview.
What was Mare Synchronos
? Mare Synchronos was a third-party tool for Final Fantasy XIV that allowed mods to be synchronized across multiple player clients. Anyone who had the code of another person could see the mods installed by that person, such as outfits, hairstyles, or emotes, on their own screen. The mod was therefore very popular in the large role-playing community.
During gamescom 2025, the developer of the mod announced that Mare Synchronos would be shut down after receiving a legal inquiry regarding the project
. This sparked horrified reactions on social media as well as review bombing of the game (Steam) and the current expansion on Steam.
You can read everything about it here: Thousands of players in Final Fantasy XIV have lost their most important mod – Now negative reviews are pouring in on Steam in protest
Just a few days after the shutdown, YouTuber Xenosys Vex recently published a three-hour interview with the developer of the mod on his channel. In it, he talks about the development, the shutdown, and that over 270,000 players were using the mod.
Over 60 hours of work per week for 270,000 players
What does the developer say on YouTube? In the interview, the developer of Mare Synchronos – Dark Archon
or also Hero Fluffness
as he is called on the Mare Discord – talks about the development. The modification was developed 99% by him alone, as he and his friends were tired of having to send mod files and the associated configurations back and forth. The first prototype went live after just two weeks.
At the time of the shutdown, the mod had hundreds of thousands of registered players: In the end, I had like what, 270,000 registered people or something like that
Of these, approximately 130,000 had been active in the last 30 days before the shutdown.
He himself ultimately put in about 60 hours a week into the mod alongside his full-time job as a software developer. By the way, it was completely free, although server costs had been rising year after year. Recently, users had sent over 1,500 terabytes of data per month.
The biggest problem? Extremes within the RP community
What was the biggest problem with Mare? In the course of the interview, Dark Archon explains that he fundamentally distances himself from extreme sexual mods. But Mare Synchronos was also used for that.
The child NPC Chloe Aliapoh comes up in the conversation. The young girl is the in-game contact person for a content bingo, for which there are new rewards every week.
In this context, Dark Archon mentions that there were players who used other mods and Mare Synchronos to play child pornography content with Chloe: That’s something that I absolutely cannot accept […] I just think it’s disgusting.
The developer himself had a high moderation workload specifically because of such mods. However, he was also fundamentally dependent on reports from the community. If one has no touchpoints with these extreme sides of the role-playing community, it is incredibly difficult to imagine how far some people would go.
Roleplay vs. ERP
Role-playing in Final Fantasy XIV can mean two friends meeting and role-playing their favorite NPCs while taking harmless screenshots together. Creating beautiful screenshots has become a hobby in the general community of the game, and Square Enix regularly hosts competitions about it.
But it can also mean that guilds perform entire plays in which their members execute practiced or programmed emotes live and chat accordingly. For example, one group performed The Phantom of the Opera (via Reddit).
However, as also confirmed in the interview with Dark Archon, there are modifications for Final Fantasy XIV for sexual interactions via emotes that are used within ERP (Erotic Role Play). As long as only adult and consenting persons participate, this is usually unproblematic.
As mentioned in the interview, however, there are also players who use their ERP sessions to play out child models such as that of the NPC Chloe and thus enact child pornography – hence forbidden – content.
In the conclusion, Dark Archon asks the community not to immediately jump on the first project they find in the search for an alternative. He especially warns against mods that specifically come from the people who used Mare for child pornography role-play.
The full three-hour interview can be viewed on the YouTube channel Xenosys Vex.
While there is a highly active modding scene for Final Fantasy XIV, its use is actually not allowed. According to the Terms of Service, all third-party tools, including hairstyle and clothing mods, are fundamentally prohibited.
However, as long as a mod is not used for cheating and does not interfere with the gameplay itself, Square Enix usually turns a blind eye. We were also able to conduct an interview with the director and producer of the game at gamescom 2025. He explained, among other things, how he would design a completely new MMORPG today: The head of Final Fantasy XIV explains how he would design a new MMORPG today, but his concept won’t please many of you
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