As it nears its 24th birthday, Final Fantasy 11 is still quietly chugging along. And while FF14’s older, weirder MMO sibling has settled into a comfortable rhythm of incremental maintenance updates, its more than two decades of layered expansions and legacy systems still manage to produce some fascinating weirdness.
Sometimes that means needing to navigate a tangle of nested launchers and login accounts to start playing, or needing to suspend character creation 23 years after launch because a sudden burst of activity is overtaxing server infrastructure. Or, as is the case this week, it means Square Enix is having to send out FF11’s Game Masters to personally exterminate bugged boss monsters just so everyone can be sure they’ve actually been killed.
In a news post earlier this week, the FF11 team said it has discovered an issue with “notorious monsters” in the Limbus battle system zones. Notorious monsters are rare, named enemies that appear throughout FF11, but in the Limbus zones, defeating them contributes to the communal loot economy: Chests in the Limbus regions contain better loot based on how many notorious monsters the server’s players have killed in the region in the last month.
Once killed, a notorious monster shouldn’t respawn until after the next monthly tally, but lately defeated notorious monsters in Limbus have been reappearing early. That’s because, Square Enix said, “the server-side data recording the defeat status of notorious monsters is unexpectedly being cleared.”
While the FF11 team has already deployed a fix to prevent the issue from reoccurring in the future, the data loss means that, for this month’s Limbus tally period, “there is currently no way to tell if a notorious monster is still undefeated or has reappeared due to the data being cleared.” As a result of the unexpected data reset, those bugged monster respawns could mean a monster will be marked as undefeated at tally time because the server data no longer shows it as having properly been killed—and each undefeated monster means every player gets worse chests in Limbus next month.
Thus, there’s only one way to guarantee no players are robbed of hard-earned Limbus loot: Square Enix is dispatching Game Masters to personally murder every notorious monster in Limbus so the FF11 servers can properly verify that they’re really, truly dead.
“To achieve this, Game Masters will visit each World in sequence and defeat each motorious monster individually,” Square Enix said. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
It’s not every day that a developer orders Game Masters to perform state-sanctioned monster executions over a server hiccup, and FF11 players are—understandably—revelling in the absurdity.
“God personally stepping in to correct the world itself is way too funny,” said one Japanese fan on X via machine translation. Another said when they “imagined GM-san going on a world tour to hunt them down one by one,” they “couldn’t help but burst out laughing.”
While it’s unlikely you’d be able to level a character from scratch in time, you can watch the spectacle of FF11 GMs playing a server-hopping game of notorious monster whack-a-mole by heading to Limbus from 5 pm PST on January 29 to 7 am PST on January 30. And offer some sympathies for the monsters while you’re there. This isn’t their fault.
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