Final Fantasy XIV parks its Crucible rankings

The leaderboard is staying shut. Square Enix has postponed the start of Season 1 for Final Fantasy XIV's Crucible of the Unbroken rankings, the competitive ladder attached to the Beastmaster duty that arrived with patch 7.56, on the grounds that the company cannot currently guarantee a fair competition.

The notice went up on The Lodestone on 17 September, and it is unusually direct about the cause. "Since the release of beastmaster, we've seen many players enjoying the new limited job and tackling its challenges," it reads. "That said, we have also received considerable feedback on beastmaster's combat balance, as well as reports of issues with certain gameplay mechanics, which we are working to address."

Why the clock has stopped

The reasoning is the interesting part. Square Enix says that if rankings began under these conditions, "it would be difficult to determine whether the results reflect the intended balance of the job and its mechanics, impacting the fairness of the ranking process". In plain English: a ladder that launches on top of an unbalanced job stops measuring skill and starts measuring who found the exploit first.

Beastmaster is the new limited job introduced in patch 7.56 on 8 September, and the Crucible of the Unbroken is its exclusive duty. Limited jobs sit outside the normal Final Fantasy XIV progression path, which means they have historically taken patches to settle. No replacement date has been announced, and Square Enix says an update will follow once a start date is decided. Crucible Ranking scores will remain unavailable in-game until then.

The rest of Eorzea keeps moving

There is other news in the same Lodestone update. The Final Fantasy XV collaboration event, A Nocturne for Heroes, returns from 24 September at 08:00 GMT until 13 October at 14:59 GMT. The rewards are the ones veterans will remember: the Regalia Type-G four-seater mount, the Lucian Prince costume set, Modern Aesthetics - Lucian Locks and a set of orchestrion rolls. Square Enix notes the event is identical to the run players have already had, and that anyone who has completed it before can replay the quests through the seasonal event replay feature.

Our opinion

Delaying a leaderboard because the thing being ranked is not finished is not a humiliating decision, it is the correct one, and Square Enix deserves credit for taking it in public rather than letting a broken season quietly stand and wiping the results later. The company has form here: limited jobs have always launched strange and been patched into shape, and a ranked mode bolted onto one is a genuinely new problem. What is less forgivable is the sequencing. Beastmaster went live on 8 September with a competitive ladder already announced, which means somebody decided the balance pass could trail the launch. Final Fantasy XIV has spent a decade learning the hard way that a scoreboard turn the wrong phrase into a carrot, and the players who spent the first week min-maxing the new job were simply doing what the design told them to. Park it, fix it, then run it. The alternative is a season nobody believes and a subreddit that never lets you forget it.