Motives of Echo users

Note

This page catalogues every scoring, ranking, and progression mechanic Echo shows its own user, and examines what those mechanics are for. Everything below is drawn from reading the plugin’s own decompiled source code.

The other pages in this documentation describe what the plugin collects. Here we ask ourselves why would a player choose to run it, day after day, once they understand what it does? Echo does not just collect data passively in the background — it wraps that collection as a contest from how much information was gathered. It’s the mechanism that turns a one-time install decision into sustained, escalating participation.

The mechanics: gamification

Every item below is a distinct scoring or progression system, all computed from capturing other players

Named rank tiers with numeric thresholds (ScannerMilestones) — three independent tracks, each a ladder of named ranks a player climbs purely by accumulating more captured data:

Lifetime sightings	Characters first added by you	Territories covered
Scout — 10,000	Spotter — 100	Wanderer — 10
Surveyor — 100,000	Pathfinder — 1,000	Explorer — 25
Cartographer — 500,000	Trailblazer — 5,000	Voyager — 50
Atlas — 1,000,000	Vanguard — 10,000	Worldwalker — 100
Luminary — 2,500,000	—	—
Legend — 5,000,000	Pioneer — 25,000	—

Each track is rendered as a progress bar showing the current tier name and the next, the same visual language used for experience bars and achievement progress in video games.

First to catalogue bonus (CharactersContributed), counts characters the user was the first out of everyone running the plugin, to report. This is a deliberate design choice: it specifically rewards discovering people nobody else running Echo has logged yet.

A leaderboard (ScannerStatsResponse.PercentileBand), reports where the user’s weekly sighting count ranks against other contributors; The /echovault stats chat command surface this as "you're in the top {N}% of contributors this week" whenever the band is 75 or better. For this number to exist at all, the server must be tracking and ranking every contributor’s volume against every other contributor’s.

The optional, live overlay window (OverlayWindow), keeps a small HUD on screen during play showing the running session sighting count, A persistent drip of positive feedback for the single behavior the plugin exists to encourage.

The main Dashboard tab (DashboardTab.Draw), shows session sightings and rate, zones visited this session, and — for verified accounts — the current week’s count with the percentile line above. For unverified accounts, it suggests to “Verify to go live instantly”, directly pressuring to complete an identity-verification step, described next.

Verification-gated gratification (POST /v1/auth/verify/complete).

Note

This process is what the leaked characters on the Sunnie Sunday Report have completed.

Newly registered installations have their uploads held in an unspecified “corroboration” queue rather than published immediately. Completing Lodestone verification removes that delay.

The Coverage tab (CoverageTab.Draw / ScanSuggestions.Build), computes a “novelty percentage” — how much of that world’s population is not yet in the database. It actively points the user toward the specific places where uncatalogued people are most likely to be found.

Personal motives

• Relationship surveillance. Keeping tabs on a current or former partner’s location, play schedule, and who they’re partied or grouped with — jealousy, suspicion, or a breakup one side hasn’t emotionally let go of.

• Post-conflict monitoring. After a falling-out — a Free Company split, a raid-team dispute, a community callout — watching a specific person’s movements and associations to gather “receipts,” anticipate their next move, or maintain a sense of leverage over the conflict.

• Parasocial fixation. Following a streamer, well-known RPer, or other community figure the user has never met but feels entitled to know about, driven by fandom attachment rather than any real relationship.

• Controlling behavior. Wanting to know where a partner, friend, or FC member is and who they’re with at all times, as a substitute for trusting them or simply asking.

• Gossip and social currency. Being “the person who knows things” in a Free Company or Discord server — using passively gathered information about who is where, with whom, to gain standing or attention within a social group.

• Insecurity and reassurance-seeking. Checking on someone repeatedly out of anxiety rather than malice — the tool offers a compulsive, always-available way to resolve uncertainty that has more to do with the user’s own state of mind than with the person being watched.

• Retaliation. Deliberately building a record on a specific person after a dispute, with the explicit intent to use it against them later — for harassment, for a callout post, or simply so they “can’t hide.”

• Completionist/collector drive. Independent of any one target, the same impulse that drives achievement-hunting or in-game collection-log completion — wanting every character “logged” purely because the mechanism to do so exists, with no target in mind beyond the count itself.

• Moral distancing through reframing. Genuinely not registering the activity as surveillance because the plugin describes it as a “census” and “coverage” (see the mechanics above) — letting a user do something they would recognize as wrong if it were named plainly, while maintaining a self-image as a contributor to a benign collective project.

These motives are not mutually exclusive, and some Echo users may likely fall into more than one.

If you feel unsafe

Warning

This page exists to make Echo’s behavior legible to the people it affects. It is not a substitute for Square Enix’s own support channels, or for local law enforcement if things ever do cross into a real-world safety concern.

• Use the game’s own block and report tools first. /blocklist add stops a specific character from whispering, inviting, or otherwise reaching you directly; the in-game Support menu’s report/GM petition flow is the appropriate channel for harassing or threatening behavior tied to a specific character, regardless of what plugin (if any) enabled it. (This page makes no claim about how Square Enix would respond to a report.)

• Keep evidence in a form a GM petition can use. Screenshots, approximate in-game times, and the character+world name involved. Avoid editing the originals so the record stays usable if you do file a petition.

• Don’t engage the person directly. Confronting tends to confirm you’ve noticed and can encourage more of the same; block-and-report is generally the safer path.

• Reduce what’s passively visible. Free Company and party visibility settings, and your Lodestone character page’s own privacy options, control some of what a stranger can see or infer.

• Consider whether a public routine is making you easy to find. A posted static/raid schedule, a regular streaming slot, or a predictable daily circuit are the kind of patterns that make repeated tracking easier regardless of the tool involved; varying that routine, at least temporarily, is a low-cost mitigation.

• Secure your Square Enix account itself, separately from the in-game behavior: enable the One-Time Password app, use a unique password, and check for sessions or linked devices you don’t recognize. Account-level compromise is a different risk than being watched in-game, but the two can compound.

• Tell someone in your circle. An FC or static leader, or a friend who plays with you, so you’re not the only person who’s noticed the pattern.

None of the above requires treating this as a physical-safety emergency — most in-game tracking never becomes one. But if at any point what you’re seeing does cross into a genuine fear for your real-world safety (for example, someone demonstrates they know where you actually live), that’s the point to involve local law enforcement or a local victim-support organization, the same as for any other real-world safety concern.