Final Fantasy XIV: There’s Still Hope for Housing Lottery Entrants – Even If They Lose

In Final Fantasy XIV there have been problems with the new housing area in Ishgard for the past few days. The lottery for buying the land was completely broken for some participants. Now the head of the MMORPG is reporting in a detailed post.

The situation in brief:

• For the sale of plots in the new housing area in Ishgard, FFXIV has set up a lottery system in which players can apply for the plots.
• The winners of the lottery are then the only ones who get the right to buy the houses they want. The other participants get their deposited money back.
• However, last week’s draw had a problem where a number of properties were drawn with the winning number 0 as if the draw had no entrants. No one could buy these houses and all went away empty-handed.

The issue prompted a spate of complaints on the official FFXIV forums, subreddit, and social media as well. Ishgard is a popular town and housing there has been highly anticipated by many.

The head of the MMORPG, Naoki Yoshida, quickly spoke up and gave a detailed answer to the problem.

Winners are certain, but they don’t know yet

Yoshida says: In a blog post on the official site Yoshida explained that this is a server-side bug:

[…] While investigating this issue, we found that while the server responsible for conducting the draw is working correctly, the results were not being properly forwarded to the server responsible for managing the accommodation data.

As soon as this error is corrected and the data of the draws can be forwarded to this administration server without problems, we will be able to confirm the real winners. […]

This means that despite the error message, the winners of the broken lottery are certain. So once the bug has been fixed and the admin server has received the winner data, they should be able to get their houses as normal. A second registration for the lottery is therefore not necessary, according to Yoshida.

In addition to troubleshooting, the boss and his team are now also advising on how to proceed with the raffle. In the houses where zero was drawn as the winning number, the participants had to collect their deposited money. It was credited back to them.

But since there is still a winner, the team is now considering how best to withdraw the money for the property. That probably needs some thought.

At the moment we are still discussing exactly how the gil of players who were incorrectly marked as losers and have therefore already received a refund should be confiscated. Details on this process will be released at a later date.

Once the bug is fixed and the raffle data is restored, the housing servers will be overwritten and the winners will receive their lots.

So if you were unlucky and the 0 bug occurred in your raffle, there is still hope. You might have been drawn as a winner, even if the administration server didn’t register it that way.

So keep your eyes peeled and good luck!

Patch 6.1 was released in FFXIV a few weeks ago:

Final Fantasy XIV: Update 6.1 now wants to make life easier for solo players – patch notes