Final Fantasy XI bug forces Square Enix staff to slay bosses for players

Square Enix has stepped in directly to Final Fantasy XI after a bug caused defeated bosses to come back to life, with staff having to kill them for players.

As spotted by Automaton, the bug affects Notorious Monsters, powerful, rare bosses that require groups of players to take down. According to the official FFXI website, a server-side error caused the game to forget whether certain bosses had already been defeated, which allows them to reappear even after players have killed them.

Square Enix later confirmed that the server-side data tracking these defeats was unexpectedly cleared, meaning there is currently no way to tell whether a Notorious Monster is undefeated or has respawned.

This creates a serious problem, because the game needs to know which bosses were beaten to decide what rewards players will get. If a monster is mistakenly counted as undefeated, it could negatively affect the rewards each server will get. So, that’s where a band of trusty Square Enix employees comes in.

Square Enix addresses bug in most direct way possible

To avoid penalizing players, Square Enix has decided to treat all Notorious Monsters as defeated across every world for the current period. However, rather than relying on automated systems, the company is taking the unusual step of sending in official Game Masters to manually defeat each monster.

From January 29 to January 30, Square Enix staff will visit each world and individually slay every affected Notorious Monster themselves.

Square Enix

Players who still want to fight the monsters for personal challenges or unique data have been advised to do so before the Game Master unleashes their killing spree across the servers.

Square Enix has revealed that a fix has already been implemented to prevent the defeat data from being cleared again, but for now, players may now get the rare opportunity to see the game’s real-life Monster Hunters in action.