I Missed The Drama!
It's okay. It's probably for the best that you didn't pay that close attention. Memoria was a Dalamud plugin that aimed to be a recreation of PlayerScope for the modern age. It had flashy CSS, a public website, and a whole heap of both vibe coding and bad decisions.
That said, if you really want to catch up on all the tea and read the full technical analysis, the original version of this webpage is still available for anyone curious. Please bear in mind that link-rot may have affected certain resources and some information may no longer be accessible. We have tried to update what we can to point to Internet Archive, but unfortunately not everything was captured in time.
Memoria Says Goodbye
ArchitectRose, Memoria's operator[1], has officially taken down Memoria's webpage, GitHub, servers, and (soon) even their Discord server. They offered a goodbye for old time's sake:
Hey @everyone.
This is a hard one to write. As of today, I'm shutting Memoria down for good.
Memoria started as a small idea I couldn't let go of: what if you could remember everyone you crossed paths with in Eorzea? Every sprout you helped, every static that drifted apart, every stranger you could swear you'd partied with somewhere before. I loved building it. The late nights, the Thursday releases, the first time a profile page lit up with a character's whole history. I've learned more from this project than from anything else I've ever built.
But somewhere along the way it stopped being fun. Most of you know the situation, and I'm not going to rehash it here. The harassment got to a point where I had to honestly ask what I was getting out of this, and the answer was: not enough to justify what it was costing me and the people around me. I'd rather close this chapter myself, with a clear head, than let it get dragged out of my hands an inch at a time.
So here's where things stand:
- The server is offline, and every piece of collected player data has been permanently deleted. Doing that properly mattered to me.
- The website now holds a short goodbye, nothing more.
- The plugin will stop syncing. You can safely uninstall it and remove the repo URL from Dalamud.
- Olympus isn't going anywhere. It's unaffected, and releases continue as normal.
To everyone who tested builds, filed bug reports, argued with me about features, or just said something kind in here: thank you. Genuinely. You made a solo project feel like a team, and that's the part of Memoria I'll actually miss. The project is gone, but everything I learned building it comes with me, and you'll see it again in whatever comes next. The Discord will be shut down in 24 hours.
This isn't me leaving. I'm still here, still playing, still building. Just lighter.
See you in game.
— Memoria's Goodbye, Memoria Discord
Woof... there's a lot to unpack here. Let's just get into it.
- There was a bit of curiosity over why I chose to call Rose an "operator" rather than a "developer." Put simply, a LLM was the developer. Rose just ran the output. ↩
Tearing Down The Goodbye
Rose's goodbye certainly reads curiously, and contains a handful of things that were patently untrue. Overanalysis is the name of the game, so let's get right into it!
Memoria started as a small idea I couldn't let go of: what if you could remember everyone you crossed paths with in Eorzea? Every sprout you helped, every static that drifted apart, every stranger you could swear you'd partied with somewhere before. I loved building it. The late nights, the Thursday releases, the first time a profile page lit up with a character's whole history. I've learned more from this project than from anything else I've ever built. — Memoria's Goodbye, Memoria Discord
The original name for Memoria was AlphaScope, and was a direct clone of PlayerScope's
old code initially published on March 10, 2025. Rose took over development of AlphaScope on July 23, 2025,
and did a little bit of work until finally starting again for real on April 22, 2026. The project was
finally renamed to Memoria on April 24, 2026, the start of our story. In fact, if you look carefully, that
name still exists in the latest versions of the source code!
Meanwhile, PlayerTrack already existed and operated on a similar "remember who you saw" model, just without the entire "upload everyone to a central server as well" angle. As alluded to in the original version of this article, there's quite a difference between wanting to retain a log of who you've interacted with and uploading said data for the world to see. Doubly so when you try (and fail) to add in alt tracking logic.
But somewhere along the way it stopped being fun. Most of you know the situation, and I'm not going to rehash it here. The harassment got to a point where I had to honestly ask what I was getting out of this, and the answer was: not enough to justify what it was costing me and the people around me. I'd rather close this chapter myself, with a clear head, than let it get dragged out of my hands an inch at a time. — Memoria's Goodbye, Memoria Discord
We can help with that! It stopped being fun once everyone realized what was being done. People tried to reach out to Rose to warn them that this was a very bad idea. The response from Rose was dismissive at best, and they showed no sign of stopping.
Now, it's important to remember here that Rose is indeed a real person[citation needed]. Even with all the chaos that was unfolding, they did not deserve to be doxxed or face potential real-life consequences for their actions; nobody does. 4Chan, as usual, jumped to vigilante justice far too readily and did so with the blatant disregard one would expect from a site of anonymous trolls. To that end, some sympathy is indeed warranted here. Having your characters de-anonymized (were it to actually work) is not quite the same as getting your real name and address posted in some of the darkest corners of the internet.
Unfortunately, sympathy is not the same as forgiveness. Rose was still playing a very dangerous game, and they happened to lose. PlayerScope did result in a handful of doxing cases as well, it's not particularly surprising that the FFXIV community would have such a visceral reaction yet again.
So here's where things stand: [...] — Memoria's Goodbye, Memoria Discord
As far as we can confirm, everything listed here is true. The website has been replaced with a goodbye page, and all API routes are no longer responding. The GitHub for the project is gone, though offline archived copies still remain - both before and after the commit history rewrite. This is one of the pesky things about the internet: even if you delete something, it's still going to be around.
We also have no way of knowing just how true all of this is. Memoria may very well still be running at a new URL from a database backup for closely-vetted friends. PlayerScope itself may be in the same place and there's practically no way for anyone to know.
To everyone who tested builds, filed bug reports, argued with me about features, or just said something kind in here: thank you. Genuinely. You made a solo project feel like a team, and that's the part of Memoria I'll actually miss. The project is gone, but everything I learned building it comes with me, and you'll see it again in whatever comes next. The Discord will be shut down in 24 hours. — Memoria's Goodbye, Memoria Discord
It does seem like Rose at least learned how to better handle LLM output and how to think a bit more thoroughly about security. One can only hope that they also learned the actual lesson of heeding warnings as well, but only time will tell.
What Was Tracked?
This section back by popular demand! Memoria left a lot of confusing things in its wake, and unfortunately a lot of things can no longer (easily) be pointed to because the source code has been purged. While copies do exist, the people who have those copies tend to not want to have that source easily accessible. That said, we can still talk about what was actually recorded.
It's important to note that Memoria's only data sources were in-game observations and Lodestone scraping; only data visible from one of those two sources were recorded. The primary concern was one purely of scale: Memoria was "interesting" since everyone's data was aggregated. In this effect it was no different from maintaining a public spreadsheet of player observations, except for the widespread (automated) aggregation.
Original versions of Memoria attempted to additionally log Account IDs, but this never worked properly thanks to the changes made in Patch 7.3. See the previous version of this article for more information, as it's not really worth re-writing entirely. However, it's prudent to assure everyone that as of Patch 7.3, no known reliable method for deanonymizing characters at scale exists.[2]
With the release of Echo Vault, the Memoria developer (same person) actually has figured out how to do this, though with the same significant at-scale caveat mentioned before. Obfuscated account IDs can be collected either by watching all observations and opportunistically connecting them together (which, if you have permission to upload, means you can claim anyone is an alt of anyone else), or by running the aforementioned fleet of trial accounts in major hubs.
We aren't particularly sure which one Echo Vault is doing (probably a mix of both if they're smart), but this still is somewhat unreliable since it requires hits in hubs. Time will tell whether Square Enix actually moves account ID blacklisting to the server side, or whether they'll do something silly like force a session logout after 48 hours. Consider roleplaying in Endwalker or Dawntrail zones instead!
Memoria also had the potential to log some other information only for users who directly interacted with it:
- If you used the Memoria plugin or visited Memoria's webpage, Memoria received your IP address[3]. Even though Memoria itself (seemingly) did not log this as an app function, server logs may still have captured IP information.
- If you submitted an opt-out or takedown request in the brief moment where Memoria required your e-mail address, Memoria (obviously) received said email address.
- If you logged in to Memoria with your Discord account (e.g., to mark your character as private or to submit data), Memoria received your Discord profile information (display name, avatar, ID, etc.), and a list of servers you were a part of. Memoria did not request the email address associated with a Discord account.
- If you used other Memoria features, it's reasonable to believe that activity like searches were also logged. Memoria's plugin did report "anonymous" telemetry including feature usage, but this did not have an API key associated with them, so linking required some more effort.
To reiterate, users who did not interact with Memoria did not have this data collected. Nobody passively scraped could have had this enhanced information collected; you had to actively give Memoria that information in some way. For the vast majority of players in Memoria's database, only information that was otherwise visible to in theory any user was collected.
- As noted in the original article, this does not mean the system is actually secure. The apparent account IDs change per login session, so as long as you stay AFK in Limsa for a while, you might be able to grab a few connections. However, there is no longer any consistent source of truth, so data collected by other users would be subject to the usual "trust me bro" rules. In a crowdsourced system, clients can (and will!) lie about observations, so any sort of mass data collection would require a veritable army of bots AFKing under aetherytes. Wait.... ↩
- This is how the Internet works in general. Every website you talk to receives your IP address, because a remote server needs to know where to send requested information. Your IP address should, generally, not be treated as sensitive information! ↩
Great Community, BTW
A lot happened in the few days since Memoria made enough of a splash to warrant people starting to pay attention to it. This domain was bought and the exposé was written (and then rewritten by hand because the original AI copy just sucked). 4chan got wind of it and did what 4chan did best. Xitter and BlueSky celebrated yet another injection of drama to bolster their waning lifeblood.
Nevertheless, all the attention had a complex result. Had this post not been written, had Twitter, BlueSky, and 4Chan picked up on all of this, it's likely that very few people would have even known Memoria existed. In the few days of chaos, Memoria did see a massive spike in user counts and recorded characters, something that would not have been possible without the Streisand Effect kicking in. Drama begets drama, and people are hungry for engagement, but that cannot be put ahead of user safety.
Even we admit fault here, honestly. Buying the domain was a hilarious play (even in retrospect), but we still spread word of the plugin (even if that wasn't our primary intent). It's very hard to control these things, and even harder to claw back once it happens. We, as a community, need to do better moving forward.
Moving Forward
There isn't really much left to say here that hasn't been said countless times before. The plugin community is vibrant and growing day by day, with some good and some bad. The community has been on the knife's edge twice now, and we've had a few close calls in the recent months. To quote a prominent developer in the ecosystem:
"The more drama we cause and the more things Square Enix has to deal with, the worse. We do not know what their threshold is, and none of us certainly want to find out. This is what makes me so upset about this entire discourse - we have slowly normalized the use of plugins in FFXIV, and now we must pay for it, as each time we slowly interfere more and more with Square Enix’s game.
— PlayerScope, plugins, and Dalamud's fate, NotNite
I spent several years of my life dedicated towards building software for FFXIV because I love it, and I would hate for that work to vanish. I wrote this post not to specifically call out the behavior of this specific plugin (even though that’s the hook), or to say we are approaching FFXIV Doomsday, but rather to express my frustration at the state we’ve gotten ourselves into. I hope our projects live on, and I hope the state of things improves."
Many people have expressed similar sentiments, and even more have poured their hearts into making the plugin ecosystem what it is today. It does not make sense to throw all of this away over a handful of vibe-coded plugins.
In the meantime, this is where this story ends. One can only hope we don't need to snipe another domain in the future. These things aren't cheap, yaknow.