Here’s What Went Wrong With FFXIV’s Housing Lottery According to Yoshi-P

The Final Fantasy XIV Housing Lottery ran into some issues over the weekend.  With widespread outcry from the player base of FFXIV who almost universally agreed that the FFXIV Housing Lottery had serious bugs.   The new feature should’ve been simple enough and it was released after patch 6.1, which should’ve allowed players to bid on plots of housing in the Empyreum District.

According to the official blog for the game, Naoki Yoshida explained what happened.  Yoshida says that “In the early hours of this morning, we identified a processing issue, as well as a server-side program issue.”  This forced the developers to take action which was outlined in terms of restoring the lottery results data, tracking down those aforementioned issues, and the verifying that the fixes they implement will work.

So what happens with the Current Lottery Situation?

The good and bad new is that there are basically two outcomes from the debacle.  If the game conducted a successful lotter and the results were correctly displayed the plots could be purchased.  However, there are also cases where the lottery was conducted successfully but the winning number was not communicated with the server.

For those that fall into the first category you will get to keep the plot that you won.  If you won but did not finalize the purchase, Square Enix suggests that you do so as soon as possible.

The bad news is for those that fall into that latter category, the ones where the Winning Lottery Number was 0.  So things are sounding like they’re going to get a little tricky for players who were in these affected plot lotteries.  Since none of the results were valid, apparently winners were selected but data was not being relayed correctly.  Once that relay is working, Square says they’ll be able to confirm the lottery winners.  Players that were in these Winning Number 0 lotteries will not need to register again to be in the running for said plots.

Future Housing Lottery in FFXIV

Square says that for the time being they are halting housing lottery in FFXIV.  The development team will be looking at what happened here and taking a multi-step process of making sure it doesn’t happen again.

The good news is sounds like is that those that were in the affected lobbies will be able to get a result at some point, but the bad news seems to be the FFXIV housing lottery is going to go on hiatus for a bit.