In Final Fantasy XIV, there have been issues with the new housing area in Ishgard in recent days. The lottery for purchasing the plots was completely broken for some participants. Now, the head of the MMORPG has released a detailed post regarding the situation.
Situation summary:
- For the sale of plots in the new housing area in Ishgard, FFXIV has established a lottery system where players can apply for the plots.
- The winners of the lottery then have the exclusive right to purchase their desired houses. Other participants will receive their deposited money back.
- However, there was an issue during the draw last week, as for a whole series of plots, the winning number 0 was drawn, as if there were no participants in the raffle. No one could acquire these houses, and everyone went empty-handed.
The problem led to a wave of complaints in the official FFXIV forums, on Reddit, and also on social media. Ishgard is a popular city, and housing there has been highly anticipated by many.
Quickly, the head of the MMORPG, Naoki Yoshida, spoke up and provided a detailed response to the problem.
Winners are decided, but they do not know it yet
What Yoshida says: In a blog post on the official site, Yoshida explained that this is a server-side bug:
[…] During the investigation of this problem, we found that while the server responsible for conducting the draw was functioning correctly, the results were not being properly communicated to the server responsible for managing the housing data.
Once this error is fixed and the draw data can be smoothly relayed to this management server, we will be able to confirm the actual winners. […]
This means that the winners of the broken lottery are actually decided despite the error message. Once the bug is fixed and the management server has received the winner data, they should be able to receive their houses normally. A second registration for the lottery is therefore not necessary, according to Yoshida.
In addition to fixing the error, the head and his team are now also discussing the next steps regarding the lottery. For the houses where the zero was drawn as the winning number, the participants had to pick up their deposited money. It has been refunded to them.
However, since there is still a winner, the team is now considering how the money for the plot can best be deducted. This needs some further consideration.
We are currently discussing how exactly the Gil of the players who were mistakenly indicated as losers and have already received a refund should be taken. Details about this process will be released at a later time.
Once the bug is fixed and the lottery data has been restored, the housing servers will be overwritten, and the winners will receive their plots.
If you were unlucky and experienced the 0-bug in your draw, there is still hope. It could be that you were drawn as a winner, even if the management server did not register it that way.
So keep your eyes open and good luck!
In FFXIV, patch 6.1 was released a few weeks ago:
Final Fantasy XIV: Update 6.1 will make life easier for solo players – Patch Notes
