Final Fantasy XIV Housing Lottery Crisis Gets Another Update & Light at the End of the Tunnel

It appears that there is some light at the end of the tunnel for Final Fantasy XIV players who have found their attempts to acquire a new home frustrated by a bug within the lottery system implemented with the latest update.

The issue caused the lottery to fail to assign many plots of land to the proper winners, simply returning a “0” value, causing considerable frustration among the community.

Today Square Enix posted another update signed by producer and director Naoki Yoshida, signalling the steps Square Enix is going to take to address the situation.

Those are as follows:

• Restoring the lottery results data
• Fixing the identified issues
• Verifying the fixes

We learn that all lotteries have actually been conducted successfully, but those who returned the dreaded “0” were affected by a failure to communicate the winner to the housing server.

Those players who managed to purchase their house need not worry, as nothing changes for them.

Those affected by the “0” issue will have to wait for a fix to be implemented. When that happens, it’ll be possible to confirm the lottery winners. Those who registered for these lotteries won’t need to register a second time. Square Enix asked for some patience as data is recovered.

If you have already recovered your downpayment, you don’t need to worry either, as Square Enix is considering the means to recollect payment from the winners that did so. More details will be announced at a later time.

Square Enix will halt the lottery process until the issue is fully sorted, and below you can see the steps they intend to take.

• Reproducing the Issue and Further Investigation
  The root cause of the issue has been determined, and we are currently running a test to reproduce said issue on the development servers. To complete this testing and verify that we have correctly identified the cause will require at least one more business day.
• Fixing Identified Errors
  The processes causing the issue will be adjusted so as to function as intended and correctly notify the housing server. We will then verify whether or not implementing these fixes resolves the overall issue.
• Verifying Fixes
  After we are certain of the root cause of the issue, we must test whether the implemented fix indeed resolves it. We expect this process to take approximately three to five business days, but ask in advance for your understanding in the event that it takes longer than expected to determine with certainty that the issue is resolved.
• Restoring Lottery Data
  The lottery data that exists on the server responsible for processing results will be used to overwrite the housing server so that the correct data is reflected. This will be done at the same time that fixes for the issue are implemented, and will require a maintenance period for all Worlds. Maintenance times will be shared as soon as we have determined them.

Yoshida-san concluded with a further apology, as follows:

“I am deeply sorry to have disappointed the hopes of our playerbase with this major housing lottery bug. I assure you that the history of your housing lottery entries and the results has been preserved, and we will do all that we can to restore data for lottery entrants without any unnecessary rollbacks or other complications.

It will take a little more time for us to correct this issue and restore the data to how it should be, but I thank you once again for your patience and understanding.”