Final Fantasy 14’s latest job has just hit the proverbial shelves, and you know what that means: emergency maintenance to fix an extremely bizarre bug. On Sep. 8, the same day that the new beastmaster class dropped, Square Enix had to quickly patch out a bug where “if the player’s character leaves the area due to a connection loss at the moment the pet uses a weapon skill that restores its master’s HP, the server may crash.”
Yes, this bug wasn’t crashing the player’s own game, but the server. While it’s a pretty fringe set of circumstances that have to line up, it’s easily replicated with a cheeky pull of one’s ethernet cable, so it makes sense that Square Enix scrambled to address this before it became a catastrophe.
If you’re unfamiliar with the beastmaster, it’s one of the game’s “limited jobs” along with the blue mage—basically, they are classes that can’t be used to clear the main story quest or endgame dungeons, but they get a bunch of unconventional abilities to futz around with. They are broadly accessible side novelties, and with everyone piling in to check out the new one, it could have been a disaster had this bug been allowed to fester.
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It’s not the first time Square Enix has had to tackle a bizarre bug in the MMO. Just last year it won the coveted “Most Specific Bug Fix in a MMO” award from PC Gamer’s Harvey Randall. With that one, players could get disconnected from the server if they listed an auction house item in a specific zone with an asking price set “between 44,442 gil and 49,087 gil.”
It’s the sort of bug that sounds like it was made up as an illustrative example of how bizarre bugs can be. But whether it’s the funniest in recent memory is still up for debate, given the ‘random buffs’ incident from back in 2023.
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