UPDATE: As of 8:10 on the morning of the 18th this has been identified and fixed server-side. Apparently the issue concerned changes made to emotes, where, after entering an instance while sitting down, players would continue to sit after exiting the instance. As the instance in question moves players underwater when completed, where /sit doesn’t work, the game would just freak the fuck out, kick players and not let them log back in until their character information was changed such that they were no longer /sitting.
“What happens if the character is moved to a situation where they can no longer perform the emote they entered with?” seems like an obvious test case, but ok.
As soon as I hit “publish” on that last post somebody on Discord pointed me to this official FFXIV forum thread.
It has been confirmed that, for those able to get to that point in the story, doing the first primal fight of Stormblood has a chance to corrupt one’s character and the resolution may require rolling out a new patch to the client (aka. no hotfix), which would take several days.
This… This might actually worse than the Warlords of Draenor thing now, depending on how long a fix takes.
Square Enix just pulled a ‘hold my beer’ on its-fucking-self.
This is why you need a PTR.