The latest job in Final Fantasy XIV went live and, unsurprisingly, triggered emergency maintenance to fix an utterly ridiculous bug. On September 8, the same day the new Beastmaster job was released, Square Enix had to urgently push a patch to address the issue: "When a pet uses a weapon skill that restores the master's HP, if the player character leaves the current area due to a network disconnection, it may cause the server to crash."
That's right—this bug didn't just crash the player's own game client; it took down the entire server. Although the trigger conditions were quite strict, requiring multiple factors to align simultaneously, it could be easily reproduced by simply unplugging the network cable. Therefore, it was only reasonable for Square Enix to rush out an emergency fix before the situation escalated.
If you're unfamiliar with Beastmasters, they are similar to Blue Mages in that they are "limited jobs" in the game. Simply put, these jobs cannot be used to complete the main scenario or tackle endgame raids, but they offer a wide array of novel and fun special abilities, serving as casual content for all players. With the launch of this new job, a massive influx of players jumped in to try it out; leaving this bug unfixed would have had disastrous consequences.
This isn't the first time Square Enix has had to fix outrageous bugs in this MMO. Last year's bug was even more tricky: listing items in the auction house within specific areas, with prices set between "44,442 gil and 49,087 gil," would cause players to disconnect from the server.