Final Fantasy 14 wins my personal award for the Most Specific Bug Fix in a MMO 2025, and I'm astonished anyone even found it in the first place
Forget the game awards, forget our top 100 list, I know what you're secretly interested in: my own personal trophy for The Most Specific Bug Fix in a MMO 2025, an award I promise you actually exists. It goes to Final Fantasy 14 which, as part of its most recent update, has announced this doozy.
In today's patch notes, an update that mostly just grants access to the new Moonfire Faire event, Square Enix writes: "In Sinus Ardorum, a player could get disconnected from the server if they put an item up for sale on the market and the asking price was set between 44,442 gil and 49,087 gil." No longer!
Sinus Ardorum is part of patch 7.21's cosmic exploration content. This zone had summoning bells—which you use to summon retainers, who'll put things up on the market for you—added in patch 7.3.
As to what could be causing this lunacy? Sadly, the update doesn't say, though I can take some somewhat-educated guesses. To put it simply, numbers in videogames are weird. Computers have a very hard time counting to infinity (in that, they can't) often causing overflow errors, which can trap you in a menu for two years, make you unable to deal damage, and summon billions of RuneScape bucks out of nowhere.
If I had to take a stab at it, some internal piece of spaghetti in Final Fantasy 14's code has intersected with whatever trick Creative Studio 3 pulled to make a summoning bell in Sinus Ardorum possible. Cue the server throwing a fit and simply punting the player off the moon in a fit of pricing-induced panic.
The bigger question is how did anyone find this bug? I suppose a range of 4,645 gil isn't too small, meaning there are plenty of appropriately-valued items in the game to put a player in the danger zone. Mind, I figure once you get punted from the game for trying to list the same item on the market board several times in a row, the cause becomes clear.
Anyway, my congratulations to whichever dev fixed that. You have won all the bounties I have to offer—which is like, uh, about five quid I found in my pocket and some leftover shakshouka I made yesterday. You're welcome. I'm keen to see what bugs the next update, which I am actually really looking forward to, brings.