AForeignGBFPlayer · @ForeignGbf
15th Apr 2019 from TwitLonger
The plight of foreign Granblue Fantasy players
Hello Mr. Kimura,
I am an English language Granblue Fantasy player and since I don't know Japanese, I will just write to you in English. I apologize for any inconvenience but this is important enough for me to at least give it a shot.
Let me first applaud you for an excellent game. I absolutely love GBF. For the past two years or so, I have played this game more than any other game and it has been a big part of my life. I appreciate your hard work into making the game and thank you for allowing foreign players to experience the game. I love that GBF has simultaneous English and Japanese release so we get content as soon as possible rather than after a long wait.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't quite have great support for foreign players, and foreign players are now getting punished for using a tool that helps them enjoy your game better. You are well aware of Viramate, a very popular extension that has some UI modification to allow people to use skills faster among other things such as being able to see actual boss hp and the turn count. I really would like for those things to be in the base game as well, but that's a different discussion.
Why I am writing you right now is because a significant number of the most dedicated foreign players have just now been banned for having used it in the past. This is dangerous. Many of my friends who have played GBF for years are now stranded during UnF event. Many will just quit the game. This damages the foreign GBF player community a lot as people will now be hesitant to try the game, to recommend it to their friends, and just to play in general if they have to live in fear of easy suspensions. I am sure a lot of the Japanese players who were using Viramate were also affected, but this hurts foreign players a lot more as our numbers are low and if our most active members are taken out, then our community gets a chilling effect that compounds the problem heavily.
I understand that you don't want people using third-party tools, but for so long Viramate seemed to have been tolerated as an exception that we took it for granted that it was okay to use it. Viramate didn't automate anything and just made life a little easier for foreign players because the bad ping makes every action lag heavily for us so we wanted to reduce cycling through the base UI if we could help it. Most of us stopped using it as soon as the developer dropped support after you sent her a Cease and Desist a couple of weeks ago. However, even people who have stopped using it got suspended today.
I sincerely request that you give foreign GBF players a pass here and let us off the hook this once. I would also love if you can incorporate some of the Viramate features into the game but that's a different story altogether.
Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
A foreign GBF player