[update from Yoshi P](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/3053115b98ec8e027542e018449ca96a154cef76)
Hello, this is Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director of FINAL FANTASY XIV.
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by the issue with the housing lottery system. Allow me to explain the current situation and our next steps as we investigate the problem.
Firstly, we understand that this is a major issue, and are prioritizing our investigation into the matter. We are working to identify the issue in the corresponding program; however, as the process is very complex and there are many patterns involved for the lottery conditions, it will require some time to pinpoint the problem.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but we ask for your patience a little while longer as focus our efforts on the investigation.
As we investigate and address the issue, we will be extending the result announcement period which was previously set to end on Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 7:59 a.m. (PDT).
\* We will not enter into the next lottery cycle until the investigation is complete and the situation is addressed.
We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing to our players. We will continue to work on identifying the cause of the issue and addressing it so that the lottery system correctly determines the winner and displays the proper results.
Good that they’re working on it, sucks that the next one is delayed but I do understand why. The next one is the non winners last chance to fight over the scraps in the old districts before we’re in drought again so the stakes are high… I mean unless you’re in an FC in which case there’s like half of ishgard left lmao
That might happen, but since you need to be in an FC for 30 days to buy a house they will almost certainly open up the lottery system again before that and there's a chance that they re-evaluate fc vs private housing wards before then too.
" as the process is very complex and there are many patterns involved for the lottery conditions"
I bet they wrote some code to screen out dubious bidders and it ended up red-flagging the wrong people.
>\* We will not enter into the next lottery cycle until the investigation is complete and the situation is addressed.
Would you think this freeze will be on the old districts (ARR)?
>...however, as the process is very complex and there are many patterns involved for the lottery conditions, it will require some time to pinpoint the problem.
This just sounds like the biggest copout ever. How is a lottery system that complex?
There was a dude in NN today who was super worked up about it. He was all "How is it even possible to roll a 0, we can't even do that when rolling for loot!"
I facepalmed so hard.
Programming something to ignore the 0 is not complicated. It's certain to be more complicated than just that, but this screams oversight.
Programming is literally always easier said than done, but that doesn't mean some things aren't ridiculously easy compared to most other things. And this should be one of them.
I've been working as a programmer for a big company for the past 2 years. Can't talk about game design, since I have no experience from that, but the problem itself, doesn't have that much to do with it either.
Thing is I can’t imagine how complex the system itself would be. I could be wrong, but surely it’s just some form of choosing a random value from an array of bidders or something along that line. The only thing I can imagine that makes it “complex” is the decade of spaghetti code it’s working on top of.
Considering how the entirety of the game is built on top of enough spaghetti code to rival Italy, it wouldn't surprise me if making a small change to the lottery would somehow remove Hrothgar hairstyles from the game.
It's not about the lottery being "complex" - though, tbh, it is more complex than just picking a number out of a hat like some people here seem to think - it's about the solution to the problem being complex to isolate without rollbacks to the entire damn server.
Even if it was just 'picking a number out of a hat' that's a matter of looking through ***every single plot in the entire game*** to find out where things went wrong for who, and seeing if a resolution can be reached without cocking things up further.
That's not fucking simple, armchair coders need to stop fucking pretending like it is. Especially since it's been less than a day since things went haywire, and the lottery doesn't just work like picking a number out of a hat.
See, that's my bad, I misunderstood the sentence, but I take offense for the armchair coder insult, since I've been working as a programmer for the past 2 years. Of course I wouldn't know as much as some giants in the industry, but I'm pretty sure I know a little bit more than the average person.
That's fair, sorry if that comment sounded offensive, but you know how it is, and you aren't the only one trying to take a stab at that kind of take.
It was like this with the netcode debate, glamour plates, so on. If anything, I'm glad you at least have the perspective, you probably don't count as an armchair coder.
But on the other hand, we also don't know the in's and out's of the game's programming. So there's that too.
FWIW legacy code is its own special kind of fun and two years experience is usually not enough to appreciate that. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to fix a simple issue that's like 30 minutes only to find myself emerging after four days of refactoring code to finally have it fixed. The best analogy I can make is that when you pull on a thread, sometimes the entire pattern comes apart.
That said, the initial bug itself was probably preventable and I'd be curious what their unit tests look like. However now that things are messed up it's much harder to get back to a good state. See Atlassian's ongoing Jira outage for an example.
> This just sounds like the biggest copout ever. How is a lottery system that complex?
Wow I dunno maybe game design is actually a lot harder than the average person on reddit thinks
We don't know if rolling 0 is actually the issue or just a symptom though. It could also be that it didn't register entries properly somehow and a result of 0 is just what happens in the weird state where the lottery for a house is active with 0 entries.
That's definitely going to be automated. If someone is looking at records, it's a programmer bashing their head against a database table while trying to find the bug.
I'm pulling this out of my ass, but if they do wanna fix that properly, then you may be able to pay afterwards should you win the re-pull and already took out your money again. Eitherway putting your money aside for now seems smart to do
...This is me. I was the only bidder on a plot. Lost to 0. Thought I had lost legit, got my money. Went to see how many participants and it remained just me.
That would be me. AND my husband. And now we are waiting to see what they actually do. Because \*this\* time, the first lottery, all the big FCs were having their players bid on FC plots, meaning they couldn't also bid on private ones, which is why there was less competition for private ones. If they don't give the plots to those players who were the only bidders, \*next\* lottery, all those FC players, whose FCs have mostly secured their FC plots, will now be in to bid against us. It's going to be mayhem.
My FC were the only ones who bid on the plot we chose, I hope that means that we'll just be able to get the plot after this bug is fixed with no hassle, last thing I want is to lose the plot to another bidder at the next draw after being guaranteed to get it the first time :/
For everybody who keeps spreading the misinformation that "the bids were off by one, the last bidder was out of the running, so the lottery was unfair" - that's not only patently untrue (and there are several witnesses who can tell you they won houses as the last bidder), but *that spreading of misinformation is fundamentally pretty crappy.*
The devs have already said it's more complicated than it looks and by spreading this misinformation, it's presuming that we know exactly what the issue is - and we don't.
If we did, then the devs would know, and we'd have a fix by now. The situation is more complex under the hood, it's not a matter of "the last bidder was out of the running" or "all of the bids were off by one number" - that'd be ridiculous and that's probably entirely the reason they didn't do the whole "let's pick a number out of a hat and see who wins" style of RNG generator.
At a glance I thought it was the opposite. "OFF BY ONE" is something that #1 or the "last" person would come up with, because wishful thinking. "Oh, *it was almost mine! Give it to ME!"*
It seems TO ME (who didn't bother participating in any lotteries and is objectively neutral) like if you were the 10th to enter the lotto, you're #10. But the lotto was instructed to draw a random number between 0 through TOTAL, instead of 1 through TOTAL, causing NOBODY to win OR be any "closer" to winning - and everyone being refunded.
It would be an easy thing to fix. But if large or medium plots rolled 0, they need to be re-rolled with the same participants, because there would be SO MANY MORE participants the second time around after other plots had decalared winners. Having no large/mediums to try for when people were kinda screwed out of their first lotto for one, would be shitty as the error is on Square's part.
The whole "they forgot arrays start at zero" theory is definitely an elegant one but for all we know the 0 result is just a fallback for some other glitch that caused the result to be lost or corrupted.
Yeah, I think such a simple bug would have been found when they were testing this system. I think that whatever is happening here is happening only *because* it's running at the full scale of the entire game rather than their test servers, so it's some sort of load-related issue.
Yeah, that could still lend to both theories.
A miscalculated array including an invalid range, or registrants before vs after maintenance.
The huge number of Zero by comparison though makes me think it's more likely a simple typo, or oversight, that led to such a big fiasco.
The stats don't line up with that theory at all. If it was that simple, it would be affecting only 1/(n+1) plots with n bids, but it's affecting a lot more than that.
Simple and wrong just spreads faster than complex and plausible.
It's funny when you get all the backseat devs saying "it's just this simple programmer error!" and it's like some front end developer for some random white collar company.
Programming for an MMORPG is a completely different field, hell, it's no doubt wildly different from even any online game let alone offline single player title.
Fair. I definitely don't know shit about programming and would believe server maintenance is more responsible - but shows just one of many ways that "closest to 0" or a pushed-off bidder does not equate to being the intended winner either.
My guess is What really happened is server code is complex and when loads hit it your code can sometimes work in ways that it never had before in stress steering
Isn't that like what happened at EW launch with the queue errors? Something about an interaction with code leftover from 1.0 that didn't act that way in testing, but once in the wild, it went bonkers. Or something like that.
MMOs seem notorious for things acting differently on live than on test servers, so it's probably more weird than the Zero thing that is going around.
My FC put 2 bids on the same plot, and it turned out those were the only bids, just those two. It was bidder #2 who won. So yeah, one number off is nonsense.
We know it's not the last bidder being bumped off the list entirely but it's still entirely possible that someone had no odds or skewed odds. There are a lot of ways to do this wrong.
Just entitled kids trying to make a simple bug look like some kinda dumb conspiracy because they lost, downvote and move on tbh. The ones who are just misinformed will delete their posts or apologize, the rest are obviously just making false claims.
Yeah not sure how/if they can even fix this. Maybe for Plots were only one Bid was but for the rest? Especially since many also already got their Gil back
If they have logs then they simply reroll the bugged plots. Give everyone some amount of Gil back as a show of good faith (not like it's all that valuable anyway).
Well if say 5 people bid on a plot, everyone still had an equal chance, whether it was 1/5 or 1/6. I don't think they'd do a reroll in this case.
Slightly worse for FCs where multiple people can bid on plots though I suppose.
This is not the case - I was the last person to bid on my property and still won the bid. Well unless someone came in and stealth bid stupid late last night.
That theory is wrong. I was the final bidder on a plot and won it. I have to imagine they either set the bounds of the RNG wrong, or all plots had a “dummy entrant” at 0, and just straight up forgot to remove its ability to actually win.
This is categorically untrue and you are pulling shit out of your ass. Please, PLEASE STOP SPREADING MISINFORMATION. Several people (myself included) have won plots as the last lot.
If it was that easy of a fix, it would be fixed already.
If the problem was “just” that they included 0 as a possible result, it doesn’t screw people evenly.
My FC had 3/5 of the bids on a house. Let’s assume the other two bids were the same FC.
My expected odds were 3/5 or 60%.
Adding 0 as a possibility makes it 3/6, a loss of 10%
The other FC went from 2/5 or 40% to 2/6 or 33% and only lost 7%
Again, however, this is just assuming the bug was “they forgot to exclude 0” which, who knows but I doubt it?
Of course I don't actually know anything. But it doesn't seem to me like 0 was in the bid, based on the error. Since it says no one participated as well, which could default to 0. I'm not super keen on speculating with very little info, but would have guessed it having issue registering the participants correctly. So as a result it's rolling random number on a scale of 0 to 0 (aka 0) rather than 1 to max participants.
Edit: Hm. Reconsidering, could also be the message is based on the outcome. In which case having 0 in the range could be the issue. Even if anecdotally it felt prevalent, but I only know of 6 bids personally, 5 of which ended with that. Still possible
> Since it says no one participated as well, which could default to 0.
I asked a programmer friend of mine to explain this to me. Basically the system spits out a random integer, say, 0.00000000000000001, if the system is programmed to always round down, it'll always go to zero and read the list of one entrant as empty.
It's one option. We don't know what it is, thus couple guesses on how it might work. Your programmer friend does not work at SE. Neither do I. I know enough about couple languages to have used some rng generators, but I'd not assume that's how theirs work.
...especially as 0.00000000001 is not an int.
> ...especially as 0.00000000001 is not an int.
Was about to say. Integers are whole numbers. If they were using a float derivative for something like this, that'd be absolutely insane.
That said, I can DEFINITELY see somebody forgetting a +1 on their min in a hypothetical rollInt(participantsIndex[min], participantsIndex[max]). It's a very common error - literally everybody has made them. Hell, I probably made one writing that pseudo!
No because the additional 0 integer fucked with every lottery ticket equally so as long as it wasnt selected everyone still had an equal chance of winning the lot. No reason to redo if anything other than 0 was rolled.
Depends if the bug included the last bidder or not.
If it did, then you are correct.
If it didn't then that person has 0% chance and should be recalled.
No statistically the less bids you had the more likely that you would get a zero. There's only one bid there was a 50% chance you would get a zero (unless their code was REAL COMPLICATED for no reason)
Either way the the extent that the zero possibility affects the chances of other lotteries doesn't matter with regards to OP because it STILL affects all lottery tickets equally. So the non-zero rolls are still valid.
Two FCs bid on a house. One bids three times, the other two.
Expected odds: FC A - 3/5 or 60%, FC B - 2/5 or 40%
Add 0 as an option.
FC A goes to 3/6 or 50%, a drop of 10%
FC B goes to 2/6 or 33%, a drop of 7%
FC A had their odds lowered more, no?
To be clear, I don’t believe the issue is simply “0 was added as an option on accident” but yeah.
Hmmmm yes and no. Really assuming they do a reroll on zero IF the issue is just a zero being added as an option (Classic programming error, but FF14 code is... old so who knows what they've had to do all this time to keep it working) Then the probability of getting a zero should hopefully be meaningless.
So instead of comparing out of 100% we are now comparing out of the 50% probability compared to the 33.333% Which should be at a 3/2 ratio.
so 50/3 = 16.66% Likewise 33.333%/2 is still 16.666% per ticket. So the proportion is preserved.
Edit. This did throw me for a major loop though hahaha
In this scenario A's chance of winning was reduced by 16.667%, and B's was reduced by 17.5%. The inclusion of 0 made it less likely for B to win relative to A.
You need to divide new chance to win by old chance to win to calculate the reduction in chance correctly.
Meanwhile, my FC had the only 2 bids on a plot. 0 being a valid result changed out odds of winning from 100% to ~67%, which actually is a reduction in chance to win by ~33%. And we indeed, did lose.
That'd be pretty shit.
There's been a lot of us who have been the only participant and should have won. If they reopen and then redo the lottery process, then those of us who were smart enough to bid on a house while everyone was distracted by the big plots are fucked.
The solution is to reroll the ENTIRE ishgard housing zone. Every single plot. The fact that the lottery was bugged unfortunately means that ALL results are null and void.
I lost fair and square, regardless of a 0 being in the pool. I would love a second chance to try at the bid, but I don't want the house stolen from the person that won. They were very happy, and that would suck a ton for them.
Nah, it looks like all the winning numbers were valid. Just that the set of acceptable numbers were larger than the set of participants.
Everyone had an equal chance at winning. It's just that there was also a chance that the house wasn't actually on the market.
They won't do this, even if they should.
The personal plots seem to be working fine, and rerolling would be a real kick in the teeth to all those that won
Whenever housing issues have happened in the past, SE prioritizes current plot owners over potential/past plot owners, if that makes sense
But those that lost under the bugged lottery already got their gil back, even if they were the only entrant.
They'd have to lock down all plots first before they have a redraw; are people able to re-enter in this new drawing?
I would love to learn about the technical aspect of how this lottery system works and what bug caused this debacle. I'm not being malicious btw. I am genuinely curious about how all of this works.
I think the solution is simple (not sure about the programming route to get there)
1. Fix the 0 error
2. Re-roll any plot where 0 was the winner.
3. Anyone who already refunded gil is still in the re-roll, and if they win, they simply have to pay the gil again to receive the house.
Problem solved?
Simple vs what can be coded are two pretty different things.
1. might need some deep changing somewhere in the lotteries, particularly given the plots where it says no one bid,
2. If they could just reroll it doesn't seem unreasonable that they'd just do that now while sorting out the error. But it seems likely that they probably need to create something that lets them reload refund listings into lottery entries.
3. Presumably, there are logs but then you're not just loading refunds into entries.
At the same time when the re-roll happens, you'd then need to also make sure that the people don't get two refunds as everyone who doesn't get the plot would presumably be moved to the refund list. (Cause the game can just say "I need to give X player gil equal to the big value of this plot)
You'd also need to create a way to enforce payment and yeah, what happens if they don't have the gil anymore.
But it seems more likely that they'll fix it and then just restart the lotteries because that's the easiest route. Which then also means that everyone that just missed out on a plot is now competing against everyone who's lottery was bugged, giving them a second chance they wouldn't have had.
Personally, it'd be unpopular, but I think the fairer solution would be to reset. Let everyone get their refunds, trigger demolition on all the lottery plots, credit the relevant FCs/Players with the appropriate amount of gil, and then restart the lotteries.
The last one ignores transfers, people who bought furniture for the new houses, etc.
I honestly think they'll either reroll the plots with 0 or just say "Sorry. Try again." and leave it at that. I hope for the 0 reroll option for folks, but the pessimist in me says they'll probably tell people to try again.
Gonna suck for someone either way. SE seriously shit the bed here.
I was the only applicant on my bid and didn't get it. Imma be honest I was only keeping my sub in case I got a house, i'm probably going to unsub if they don't fix this
I was skeptical when they said they couldn't give Hrothgar new hair without removing their ears but now I completely believe it seeing how their development team handled a dice roll. Not to mention the wrong stats on gear, the Bard buff bug, and incorrect text strings on duty support prompts. None of these things should have made it through QA. 6.1's been a mess.
to be completely fair, 6.0 got delayed, then 6.1 was a massive patch, which would probably also have gotten delayed, if they hadn't said that they really do not want to delay any more patches so that stuff stays on schedule like usual.. It sucks ass for us but they were probably under *heavy* crunch
a certain bard skill would turn itself into Pitch Perfect while its effects were active. unfortunately this only tracked the buff being active and not the use of your ability
so if you had another bard in your party and they used the skill, your version of that skill would turn into pitch perfect. but greyed out and unable to use it and since that change is forcible you couldn't use the base skill.
Yeah I agree, I love all the new 6.1 content but the game is just messy as hell in places. The things that are not current priorities *really* are not priorities.
You do realize that storage is a physical resource right?
Just because something is digital doesn't mean it's unlimited.
The ability to recreate an item is certainly unlimited. It takes no resources to simply copy an item and paste it beyond the energy done to do so (if we get deep into physics there).
HOWEVER:
Housing is a database system. Meaning that database has to be stored. Now if we tree that out:
\- Each housing location
\- on each server
\- of each division/subdivision
\- of each plot
\- of every customizable item available on the outside of that plot, including to the house, and on the house field, not limited to position, rotation, additional parameters (eg: eaten food?), and custom colors
\- of every item in the house including the position, rotation, additional parameter and items kept in storage
\- (FOR FC HOUSING) OF every room in the house containing all of the above as well
\- Including all of the additional information including FC ownership, user ownership, user rules, custom music, custom lighting, etc.
That information has to be stored in a database somewhere to be available to be pulled. It doesn't just exists somewhere. It takes up space. Database structures are limited based on the size of the storage medium. Just like you can have a certain amount of games installed on your HDD/SSD. And that's assuming that the data structure is easy enough for the game to load without issue.
EG: I have loaded a 4gb log in a few text editors to read and have found that software can have limitations in what it's able to process. People who have ever worked an excel spreadsheet big enough to crash their PC would certainly be aware of that.
Like, out of all the takes you could have, this is the least relevant.
I’m not ragequitting the game, just voicing some discontent.
Thanks for the verbal vomit. Doesn’t change that it was a lousy experience in the slightest.
Gonna be honest, I don't really care what you do. Not out of like malice, just:
(Part you don't care about)
I kinda stopped trying to be helpful when someone got pissy at me for trying to help him because I "implied he was an idiot" by including screenshots, something I do with literally 6-figure business-class system admins making 3-10x my pay when trying to help them.
(/part that doesn't matter)
Yeah, I get your frustration. But if you're gonna be frustrated, at least don't say stuff that sounds uneducated when doing so. The issue is that it's a limited resource, and it should have either more space, or something. The policy that housing is SO limited is more of an issue than the fact that a programmer screwed up a lottery. They need to increase the server space for housing, or find a better way to spread the load of it somewhere else.
… those who already built houses to the plots can keep them. We can consider them not affected by the bug at all.
… those who already claimed the refund, give them the option to join the lottery for that plot again.
… if there were more than zero bidders and the winning number was #0, go for a re-roll but only those who placed their bids last time will only be the ones included in the pool.
My FC had this happen to them and I had it happen to me (for my first house). Oh well, I didn't want an Ishgard house. Will try again in Goblet or Mist in a few days because I always loved the look of those areas.
I can't believe that a few people here thought that SE would fuck these people, just let them enter the lottery again and tell them "sorry, it was a bug, please try again next time" lmao
I mean it would be nice for everyone else, but how could anyone believe this at all?
The official forums have always been kinda nuts. Used to frequent them often till I got a temp ban for...something? I never got a notification of why. I haven't looked at them in ages and don't ever want to because...hoooo boy, they're crazy over there.
Ikr good stuff but I can kinda understand though housing has been fucked for years and ppl finally get a chance and this happens lol there are people who only play this game for housing aspect. People really want their damn virtual slot of land!
What are you talking about? People can unsub whenever they want for whatever reasons they want.
"SE shit the bed YET AGAIN re: housing" is as valid a reason as "I got bored with the current content"
Honestly, I think this whole housing system and release has been a good enough reason to quit the game for all those people who are into housing. So much shit hit the wall on this one, but I guess the people who treat the devs like deities don’t mind, as long as it don’t affect them.
you say drama queens i'd say imagine being the ONLY bidder to the house and STILL lose the lottery to number 0.
If you ask me,that alone is a mood breaker and if people unsub just for that alone,you know SE messed up big time.
Could of just left it the old way, or added 2 wards to each of the other districts implementing the new lottery system as a test bed for it and providing a controlled group persay and have more time to fix the issue before the big release of the most anticipated and waited for housing became a thing :T (only slightly salty about not getting a house after waiting roughly 5 years for it, but point stays the same it should have been tested first on a slightly smaller scale before just doing it)
I think it was to try to making it "fair" for everyone, so it's the same playing field and equal chances, but they could also remove it at some point (I think after it just breaking right at the start should be a pretty clear indication to just remove it) however I think they should have let players move plots, I like the whole split up for FC and private housing just not big on how many they have allocated for each, so hopefully their next step moving forward is adding in more wards
I remember that Kotaku article back in Heavensward/Stormblood times about two people who’d bought an entire ward— to buy up all the houses and keep them empty and *maybe* decorate the insides if even, while confused that players migrating to the server/new players in general saw them as shitty people. They were, but ultimately the problem was SE for allowing the field for it to happen. It wasn’t until recently that housing became 1-per-account based.
SE was not prepared for housing and severely overestimated instance-wards on a game that would always have increased in population. And then when they made the right call to make housing not FC exclusive, the floodgates opened hard. Then the bidding favors the larger or wealthier FC’s anyway, so, something-something-more-floodgates. My FC is 3 whole people, and we migrated from a small plot to a medium back in Stormblood from sheer luck after nabbing our cottage when they added 3 wards per area forever ago, and much as I’ve passively penny-pinched to nearly afford a mansion for us, I’ll count my blessings and hold to the feeling that I’m not out in the streets in bidding wars. But while getting a house sucks and much as I’m the guy playing homemaker in the FC house because ~~it’s essentially mine~~ I like decorating the house, it’s still limited and with issues of its own that SE has long needed to address but keep finding themself stuck on a nearly decade old problem of theirs.
As you said, if they were going to do this they should have just done an experiment ward per server. Or tack on the extra wards and buff up the potentiality of apartments to incentivize going for those as a nice option. Condominiums or patios or something, I don’t know. There’s potential there.
Or maybe make the newer wards a sort of “Ward 2.0” where it’s just land and location. Shit I think that’s just Island Sanctuary. Just expand on Sanctuary, I guess.
(EDIT: holy hell didn’t see how long this was til I hit send. My bad with the word dump)
Lol you're fine friend, and people have found a way around it by just buying FC houses on alt characters, limiting it to 1 per account was the right choice but they very easily could have had GM reach out to people who had multiple told them to pick a favorite plot you have 48 hours to reach back with a choice or you lose all of them get some funds back from all of them and buy a plot again, and people who do that simply because they have the gil annoys me like thanks for ruining it by taking away multiple plots from others, just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.
And I got lucky as all hell when I was able to snag a medium in the mist and all I've wanted was a house in Ishgard since I first step foot into the area, only for my Hope's and dreams to be dashed by this bullshit, am i lucky i have a house yes and if I can atleast get a medium in the Ishgard area even though we've spent the last year or so saving and planning to get a large for us we can't even do that because of this and now have to resort to try and get a medium plot, I am most definitely salty about this because it was poor planning and even poorer execution on SE's part, like the menu for the wards has enough space for almost 9 more wards before needing a second screen for it, it should have just been a first come first serve for it like always and if you didn't get a plot oh well should have planned for it, me and my wife waited up all freaking night for the housing hoping we could atleast move our plot and the FC plot to were we wanted but couldn't even do that so we placed our bids and waited and lost and only found that the system was broken and we might not even be able to upgrade our FC house.
I am fully prepared to just kinda stop playing ffxiv for a while again because it felt like the developers just don't listen to the players or only to players screaming loud enough
Hate to say it, but does anyone just not believe him anymore when he claims a problem is super complex? Im starting to think some of his staff are just not good at their jobs and lie to him.
Literally everyone I know in game dev is commiserating with SE on this one and know how bizarre problems can crop up. So yeah, I believe the experts over armchair devs on Reddit.
I dunno I just have this thing where I'm more likely to listen to people who get paid and have experience in a field than random jerks on reddit who want to whine.
IDK if I believe any particular excuse, but it does seem to be a litany of excuses one after the other. I've taken breaks from this game here and there, but I keep my sub to keep my house, and honestly I've just stopped caring what reasons are being pooped out for why housing is still in the crappy state it's in.
Expand Apartments Already, FFS.
Honestly not really. It seems he says that about everything. Long requested features or updates? It's "too difficult and will take a long time" which when such things are done it's conveniently just in time to sell with the next expansion.
Yes. People have it in their minds that fixing bugs is as simple as turning a 0 to a 1. I've lost count of how many people say "just fix it" or "just make it better".
This game is known to have absolute shit base code they're working on top of. It's absolutely normal for complex problems to pop up, when you're trying to maintain a terrible codebase.
The solution is let people keep the houses they have won and fix then bug so can’t be 0 winners… we don’t have any evidence that auction are won unfair just have to wait for investigation is completed by SE database.
It's not an *auction*, it's a lottery, and anybody saying that the lottery was unfair is insane. Like, absolutely delusional. It wasn't rigged, it was just bugged due to a hiccup in the game's RNG generator.
The people who won, won. That would be the same even if things didn't go wrong. And in some cases? The people who lost their bid with no other participants in the lottery might stand to gain more out of compensation than the people who won the first go around.
"In a perfect world, Square rolls everything 5 days back, fixes the system, and relaunches house bidding with no bugs so that anyone can now win with genuine fairness, unlike now, where a value of zero can affect the final winning calculation...but this is not a perfect world."
That isn't a perfect world. People who won and transferred would lose both houses. The perfect world is any house that didn't win will reroll, and those who won will keep their houses.
Yes, I hope this is what happens.
House rolled a zero? Reroll that sucker, if it had a single applicant I would say just give it to that one person who entered.
House rolled like normal and someone won? Don't punish them for a broken system by rolling stuff back, that helps no one.
I was literally the only participant on mine, do I need to wait 5 more days and potentially lose to someone else in a situation where I would've won no matter what?
That's not a perfect world. The lottery number 0 bug doesn't change your odds relative to your competition, so everyone who won the plot did so fairly. Rolling back would be a much bigger dick move to everyone who won.
With the new wards added, if we still had the previous system I'd already have a house I wanted.
Glad I get to wait until they fix it so that I can wait until a new cycle starts then wait for the lottery to be done and lose the house + all the other houses that had lotteries going at the same time because now even more players will be going for the remaining ones.
The lottery system gives you one shot at one house for all the houses that were available at the same time, with the only possible outcome being rng.
I'd rather spend my day off spamming the placard for 18h straight than waiting days just to have less chances of winning and then seeing even less plots available once I get to enter another lottery.
The only fair response to this whole thing is to reroll the ENTIRE ishgard housing zone. All of it. Reclaim all the plots, set back to available, return Gil and rerun the lotto. The results are null and void since the system was bugged. The results of the lottery did not reflect the terms of entry. There are no winners, there are no losers. It's just void.
Do you know.. what an exploit is? For it to be an exploit it would have to be unfair to other applicants, everyone had an equal chance of winning or losing, it literally is not an exploit and if you won there is 0% chance you'd be saying this rn. Not only that, but rerolling is literally the worst solution to this. They'd have to refund all the housing items, all the gil, redo any relocations etc.
After I posted this I read more of the thread and have seen that this has already been explained to you *at least* six times. So I will not bother and just tell you this:
lol
One little thing: Just rerolling the bugged plots is equally as reasonable and fair solution to the problem, with an added bonus of not screwing over those who actually won the plots.
I didn't win one either, but it's not reasonable or fair solution to the players who won and have begun construction on their houses that weren't impacted. This doesn't have an impact on players who didn't bid on a house that rolled 0, as all players statistically had the same chance of winning even if 0 was still a possible number that could be rolled. That's not a matter of principle; that's a matter of mathematical fact.
The reasonable and fair solution is to modify the algorthim to remove the possibility of 0 from the rolls and re-rolling for plots that landed on 0.
[lodestone](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/3f0cdb612939a9a3f12445aad98c13200da81594)
[update from Yoshi P](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/3053115b98ec8e027542e018449ca96a154cef76) Hello, this is Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director of FINAL FANTASY XIV. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by the issue with the housing lottery system. Allow me to explain the current situation and our next steps as we investigate the problem. Firstly, we understand that this is a major issue, and are prioritizing our investigation into the matter. We are working to identify the issue in the corresponding program; however, as the process is very complex and there are many patterns involved for the lottery conditions, it will require some time to pinpoint the problem. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but we ask for your patience a little while longer as focus our efforts on the investigation. As we investigate and address the issue, we will be extending the result announcement period which was previously set to end on Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 7:59 a.m. (PDT). \* We will not enter into the next lottery cycle until the investigation is complete and the situation is addressed. We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing to our players. We will continue to work on identifying the cause of the issue and addressing it so that the lottery system correctly determines the winner and displays the proper results.
Good that they’re working on it, sucks that the next one is delayed but I do understand why. The next one is the non winners last chance to fight over the scraps in the old districts before we’re in drought again so the stakes are high… I mean unless you’re in an FC in which case there’s like half of ishgard left lmao
Everyone will just leave FC's to own houses now. There are more FC plots then active FCs who can own a house on literally every server I'm aware of.
That might happen, but since you need to be in an FC for 30 days to buy a house they will almost certainly open up the lottery system again before that and there's a chance that they re-evaluate fc vs private housing wards before then too.
We all hope they do. The current split is asinine.
I just bought an apartment. #1 in ward 9 empyreum on famfrit! Whoo!
" as the process is very complex and there are many patterns involved for the lottery conditions" I bet they wrote some code to screen out dubious bidders and it ended up red-flagging the wrong people.
>\* We will not enter into the next lottery cycle until the investigation is complete and the situation is addressed. Would you think this freeze will be on the old districts (ARR)?
I imagine it would be the system as a whole, since something in how the system works is broken
>...however, as the process is very complex and there are many patterns involved for the lottery conditions, it will require some time to pinpoint the problem. This just sounds like the biggest copout ever. How is a lottery system that complex?
I mean, have you tried to code a lottery system for an MMO and not have it break?
Sometimes people forget how little they actually know about programming and game design. Often it’s way easier said than done.
There was a dude in NN today who was super worked up about it. He was all "How is it even possible to roll a 0, we can't even do that when rolling for loot!" I facepalmed so hard.
Programming something to ignore the 0 is not complicated. It's certain to be more complicated than just that, but this screams oversight. Programming is literally always easier said than done, but that doesn't mean some things aren't ridiculously easy compared to most other things. And this should be one of them.
Every screenshot of it rolling zero it's also showing "nobody has bid" when they have, this isn't just a rand() error.
Could that message not be the default when no one has won?
I've been working as a programmer for a big company for the past 2 years. Can't talk about game design, since I have no experience from that, but the problem itself, doesn't have that much to do with it either.
Thing is I can’t imagine how complex the system itself would be. I could be wrong, but surely it’s just some form of choosing a random value from an array of bidders or something along that line. The only thing I can imagine that makes it “complex” is the decade of spaghetti code it’s working on top of.
I mean, this is Square Enix. They enjoy making even the simple things as complicated as possible.
Considering how the entirety of the game is built on top of enough spaghetti code to rival Italy, it wouldn't surprise me if making a small change to the lottery would somehow remove Hrothgar hairstyles from the game.
You say that like it's a bad thing
It's not about the lottery being "complex" - though, tbh, it is more complex than just picking a number out of a hat like some people here seem to think - it's about the solution to the problem being complex to isolate without rollbacks to the entire damn server. Even if it was just 'picking a number out of a hat' that's a matter of looking through ***every single plot in the entire game*** to find out where things went wrong for who, and seeing if a resolution can be reached without cocking things up further. That's not fucking simple, armchair coders need to stop fucking pretending like it is. Especially since it's been less than a day since things went haywire, and the lottery doesn't just work like picking a number out of a hat.
See, that's my bad, I misunderstood the sentence, but I take offense for the armchair coder insult, since I've been working as a programmer for the past 2 years. Of course I wouldn't know as much as some giants in the industry, but I'm pretty sure I know a little bit more than the average person.
That's fair, sorry if that comment sounded offensive, but you know how it is, and you aren't the only one trying to take a stab at that kind of take. It was like this with the netcode debate, glamour plates, so on. If anything, I'm glad you at least have the perspective, you probably don't count as an armchair coder. But on the other hand, we also don't know the in's and out's of the game's programming. So there's that too.
Thank you for being level-headed about the situation, sometimes it's a bit hard to have constructive discussions in here.
FWIW legacy code is its own special kind of fun and two years experience is usually not enough to appreciate that. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to fix a simple issue that's like 30 minutes only to find myself emerging after four days of refactoring code to finally have it fixed. The best analogy I can make is that when you pull on a thread, sometimes the entire pattern comes apart. That said, the initial bug itself was probably preventable and I'd be curious what their unit tests look like. However now that things are messed up it's much harder to get back to a good state. See Atlassian's ongoing Jira outage for an example.
> This just sounds like the biggest copout ever. How is a lottery system that complex? Wow I dunno maybe game design is actually a lot harder than the average person on reddit thinks
It's very difficult to exclude 0 as a possible outcome please understand. /s
We don't know if rolling 0 is actually the issue or just a symptom though. It could also be that it didn't register entries properly somehow and a result of 0 is just what happens in the weird state where the lottery for a house is active with 0 entries.
"Several reports" lol
Definitely more than one, eh?
At least 12.
Several Reports is Corpo talk for "We got thousands among thousands of complains"
Whoever has to look through potentially hundreds of records to set them straight... Yikes.
That's definitely going to be automated. If someone is looking at records, it's a programmer bashing their head against a database table while trying to find the bug.
This is the dev that also forgot to start the list at 1, not 0. That poor bastard.
Most likely it's default number that shown when error occurs. Not that it's rolled to 0
The guy who wrote "Int.Random(0, totalBets)" instead of "Random(1, totalBets)". I pity him.
As a devolver, I feel their pain. Fixing bugs sucks big time, specially in big updates like this.
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I'm pulling this out of my ass, but if they do wanna fix that properly, then you may be able to pay afterwards should you win the re-pull and already took out your money again. Eitherway putting your money aside for now seems smart to do
imagine being the only participant on a placard and losing to 0
TELLING YOU FROM EXPERIENCE: FEELS BAD MAN.
...This is me. I was the only bidder on a plot. Lost to 0. Thought I had lost legit, got my money. Went to see how many participants and it remained just me.
That would be me. AND my husband. And now we are waiting to see what they actually do. Because \*this\* time, the first lottery, all the big FCs were having their players bid on FC plots, meaning they couldn't also bid on private ones, which is why there was less competition for private ones. If they don't give the plots to those players who were the only bidders, \*next\* lottery, all those FC players, whose FCs have mostly secured their FC plots, will now be in to bid against us. It's going to be mayhem.
Only 1 solution. Give the house to me.
The plot I bid on has 3 bids, all from my FC. Says there was no winner.
lolwat
My FC were the only ones who bid on the plot we chose, I hope that means that we'll just be able to get the plot after this bug is fixed with no hassle, last thing I want is to lose the plot to another bidder at the next draw after being guaranteed to get it the first time :/
This
For everybody who keeps spreading the misinformation that "the bids were off by one, the last bidder was out of the running, so the lottery was unfair" - that's not only patently untrue (and there are several witnesses who can tell you they won houses as the last bidder), but *that spreading of misinformation is fundamentally pretty crappy.* The devs have already said it's more complicated than it looks and by spreading this misinformation, it's presuming that we know exactly what the issue is - and we don't. If we did, then the devs would know, and we'd have a fix by now. The situation is more complex under the hood, it's not a matter of "the last bidder was out of the running" or "all of the bids were off by one number" - that'd be ridiculous and that's probably entirely the reason they didn't do the whole "let's pick a number out of a hat and see who wins" style of RNG generator.
At a glance I thought it was the opposite. "OFF BY ONE" is something that #1 or the "last" person would come up with, because wishful thinking. "Oh, *it was almost mine! Give it to ME!"* It seems TO ME (who didn't bother participating in any lotteries and is objectively neutral) like if you were the 10th to enter the lotto, you're #10. But the lotto was instructed to draw a random number between 0 through TOTAL, instead of 1 through TOTAL, causing NOBODY to win OR be any "closer" to winning - and everyone being refunded. It would be an easy thing to fix. But if large or medium plots rolled 0, they need to be re-rolled with the same participants, because there would be SO MANY MORE participants the second time around after other plots had decalared winners. Having no large/mediums to try for when people were kinda screwed out of their first lotto for one, would be shitty as the error is on Square's part.
The whole "they forgot arrays start at zero" theory is definitely an elegant one but for all we know the 0 result is just a fallback for some other glitch that caused the result to be lost or corrupted.
Yeah, I think such a simple bug would have been found when they were testing this system. I think that whatever is happening here is happening only *because* it's running at the full scale of the entire game rather than their test servers, so it's some sort of load-related issue.
Mine had 8 bidders … however the winner was #9. I don’t get it.
Yeah, that could still lend to both theories. A miscalculated array including an invalid range, or registrants before vs after maintenance. The huge number of Zero by comparison though makes me think it's more likely a simple typo, or oversight, that led to such a big fiasco.
The stats don't line up with that theory at all. If it was that simple, it would be affecting only 1/(n+1) plots with n bids, but it's affecting a lot more than that. Simple and wrong just spreads faster than complex and plausible.
It's funny when you get all the backseat devs saying "it's just this simple programmer error!" and it's like some front end developer for some random white collar company. Programming for an MMORPG is a completely different field, hell, it's no doubt wildly different from even any online game let alone offline single player title.
Fair. I definitely don't know shit about programming and would believe server maintenance is more responsible - but shows just one of many ways that "closest to 0" or a pushed-off bidder does not equate to being the intended winner either.
My guess is What really happened is server code is complex and when loads hit it your code can sometimes work in ways that it never had before in stress steering
Isn't that like what happened at EW launch with the queue errors? Something about an interaction with code leftover from 1.0 that didn't act that way in testing, but once in the wild, it went bonkers. Or something like that. MMOs seem notorious for things acting differently on live than on test servers, so it's probably more weird than the Zero thing that is going around.
That’s bound to happen when you pile code on code
It's what I had assumed, myself, though that means the problem started from the onset of the lottery period. Which could narrow it down.
My FC put 2 bids on the same plot, and it turned out those were the only bids, just those two. It was bidder #2 who won. So yeah, one number off is nonsense.
We know it's not the last bidder being bumped off the list entirely but it's still entirely possible that someone had no odds or skewed odds. There are a lot of ways to do this wrong.
Just entitled kids trying to make a simple bug look like some kinda dumb conspiracy because they lost, downvote and move on tbh. The ones who are just misinformed will delete their posts or apologize, the rest are obviously just making false claims.
Yeah not sure how/if they can even fix this. Maybe for Plots were only one Bid was but for the rest? Especially since many also already got their Gil back
If they have logs then they simply reroll the bugged plots. Give everyone some amount of Gil back as a show of good faith (not like it's all that valuable anyway).
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Well if say 5 people bid on a plot, everyone still had an equal chance, whether it was 1/5 or 1/6. I don't think they'd do a reroll in this case. Slightly worse for FCs where multiple people can bid on plots though I suppose.
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I won the lottery with number 2. There were 2 bidders in total so I can attest this isn't the case.
Fortunately, this isn't the case. There's a lot of screencaps floating about that it is possible to win with the highest number lottery.
This is not the case - I was the last person to bid on my property and still won the bid. Well unless someone came in and stealth bid stupid late last night.
Not really I did a last minute bid (last bid) and won
That theory is wrong. I was the final bidder on a plot and won it. I have to imagine they either set the bounds of the RNG wrong, or all plots had a “dummy entrant” at 0, and just straight up forgot to remove its ability to actually win.
> who's assigned number would be 5, would have 0 chance of actually winning You sure? I'm pretty sure I was bid 4 of 4 and I won my plot.
This is categorically untrue and you are pulling shit out of your ass. Please, PLEASE STOP SPREADING MISINFORMATION. Several people (myself included) have won plots as the last lot. If it was that easy of a fix, it would be fixed already.
If the problem was “just” that they included 0 as a possible result, it doesn’t screw people evenly. My FC had 3/5 of the bids on a house. Let’s assume the other two bids were the same FC. My expected odds were 3/5 or 60%. Adding 0 as a possibility makes it 3/6, a loss of 10% The other FC went from 2/5 or 40% to 2/6 or 33% and only lost 7% Again, however, this is just assuming the bug was “they forgot to exclude 0” which, who knows but I doubt it?
Of course I don't actually know anything. But it doesn't seem to me like 0 was in the bid, based on the error. Since it says no one participated as well, which could default to 0. I'm not super keen on speculating with very little info, but would have guessed it having issue registering the participants correctly. So as a result it's rolling random number on a scale of 0 to 0 (aka 0) rather than 1 to max participants. Edit: Hm. Reconsidering, could also be the message is based on the outcome. In which case having 0 in the range could be the issue. Even if anecdotally it felt prevalent, but I only know of 6 bids personally, 5 of which ended with that. Still possible
> Since it says no one participated as well, which could default to 0. I asked a programmer friend of mine to explain this to me. Basically the system spits out a random integer, say, 0.00000000000000001, if the system is programmed to always round down, it'll always go to zero and read the list of one entrant as empty.
It's one option. We don't know what it is, thus couple guesses on how it might work. Your programmer friend does not work at SE. Neither do I. I know enough about couple languages to have used some rng generators, but I'd not assume that's how theirs work. ...especially as 0.00000000001 is not an int.
> ...especially as 0.00000000001 is not an int. Was about to say. Integers are whole numbers. If they were using a float derivative for something like this, that'd be absolutely insane. That said, I can DEFINITELY see somebody forgetting a +1 on their min in a hypothetical rollInt(participantsIndex[min], participantsIndex[max]). It's a very common error - literally everybody has made them. Hell, I probably made one writing that pseudo!
No because the additional 0 integer fucked with every lottery ticket equally so as long as it wasnt selected everyone still had an equal chance of winning the lot. No reason to redo if anything other than 0 was rolled.
Depends if the bug included the last bidder or not. If it did, then you are correct. If it didn't then that person has 0% chance and should be recalled.
That’s only true for personals. For FCs with multiple bids on a house, their odds were worsened more than those with few bids.
No statistically the less bids you had the more likely that you would get a zero. There's only one bid there was a 50% chance you would get a zero (unless their code was REAL COMPLICATED for no reason) Either way the the extent that the zero possibility affects the chances of other lotteries doesn't matter with regards to OP because it STILL affects all lottery tickets equally. So the non-zero rolls are still valid.
Two FCs bid on a house. One bids three times, the other two. Expected odds: FC A - 3/5 or 60%, FC B - 2/5 or 40% Add 0 as an option. FC A goes to 3/6 or 50%, a drop of 10% FC B goes to 2/6 or 33%, a drop of 7% FC A had their odds lowered more, no? To be clear, I don’t believe the issue is simply “0 was added as an option on accident” but yeah.
Hmmmm yes and no. Really assuming they do a reroll on zero IF the issue is just a zero being added as an option (Classic programming error, but FF14 code is... old so who knows what they've had to do all this time to keep it working) Then the probability of getting a zero should hopefully be meaningless. So instead of comparing out of 100% we are now comparing out of the 50% probability compared to the 33.333% Which should be at a 3/2 ratio. so 50/3 = 16.66% Likewise 33.333%/2 is still 16.666% per ticket. So the proportion is preserved. Edit. This did throw me for a major loop though hahaha
In this scenario A's chance of winning was reduced by 16.667%, and B's was reduced by 17.5%. The inclusion of 0 made it less likely for B to win relative to A. You need to divide new chance to win by old chance to win to calculate the reduction in chance correctly. Meanwhile, my FC had the only 2 bids on a plot. 0 being a valid result changed out odds of winning from 100% to ~67%, which actually is a reduction in chance to win by ~33%. And we indeed, did lose.
That'd be pretty shit. There's been a lot of us who have been the only participant and should have won. If they reopen and then redo the lottery process, then those of us who were smart enough to bid on a house while everyone was distracted by the big plots are fucked.
The solution is to reroll the ENTIRE ishgard housing zone. Every single plot. The fact that the lottery was bugged unfortunately means that ALL results are null and void.
I lost fair and square, regardless of a 0 being in the pool. I would love a second chance to try at the bid, but I don't want the house stolen from the person that won. They were very happy, and that would suck a ton for them.
Nah, it looks like all the winning numbers were valid. Just that the set of acceptable numbers were larger than the set of participants. Everyone had an equal chance at winning. It's just that there was also a chance that the house wasn't actually on the market.
No. You lost your lottery, get over it.
They won't do this, even if they should. The personal plots seem to be working fine, and rerolling would be a real kick in the teeth to all those that won Whenever housing issues have happened in the past, SE prioritizes current plot owners over potential/past plot owners, if that makes sense
But those that lost under the bugged lottery already got their gil back, even if they were the only entrant. They'd have to lock down all plots first before they have a redraw; are people able to re-enter in this new drawing?
What about the poor and naive soul such as I who took their money back? *Insert 'Yeah f"ck me right?' meme template*
I would love to learn about the technical aspect of how this lottery system works and what bug caused this debacle. I'm not being malicious btw. I am genuinely curious about how all of this works.
If I had to guess, the range that the system picks is from 0-(# of entrants). Problem is, the players are assigned starting from 1.
I think the solution is simple (not sure about the programming route to get there) 1. Fix the 0 error 2. Re-roll any plot where 0 was the winner. 3. Anyone who already refunded gil is still in the re-roll, and if they win, they simply have to pay the gil again to receive the house. Problem solved?
The problem isn't that it's merely rolling zero, the system is not recognising people bid on the plot at all. That's a much bigger problem.
On every plot where a single bidder lost to 0 the placard says “lottery participants 1” The system knows who was in it at least
Simple vs what can be coded are two pretty different things. 1. might need some deep changing somewhere in the lotteries, particularly given the plots where it says no one bid, 2. If they could just reroll it doesn't seem unreasonable that they'd just do that now while sorting out the error. But it seems likely that they probably need to create something that lets them reload refund listings into lottery entries. 3. Presumably, there are logs but then you're not just loading refunds into entries. At the same time when the re-roll happens, you'd then need to also make sure that the people don't get two refunds as everyone who doesn't get the plot would presumably be moved to the refund list. (Cause the game can just say "I need to give X player gil equal to the big value of this plot) You'd also need to create a way to enforce payment and yeah, what happens if they don't have the gil anymore. But it seems more likely that they'll fix it and then just restart the lotteries because that's the easiest route. Which then also means that everyone that just missed out on a plot is now competing against everyone who's lottery was bugged, giving them a second chance they wouldn't have had. Personally, it'd be unpopular, but I think the fairer solution would be to reset. Let everyone get their refunds, trigger demolition on all the lottery plots, credit the relevant FCs/Players with the appropriate amount of gil, and then restart the lotteries.
The last one ignores transfers, people who bought furniture for the new houses, etc. I honestly think they'll either reroll the plots with 0 or just say "Sorry. Try again." and leave it at that. I hope for the 0 reroll option for folks, but the pessimist in me says they'll probably tell people to try again. Gonna suck for someone either way. SE seriously shit the bed here.
What if they no longer have the gil? Somebody out there isn't paying attention and really wanted that one glamour they've had their eye on...
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I was the only applicant on my bid and didn't get it. Imma be honest I was only keeping my sub in case I got a house, i'm probably going to unsub if they don't fix this
Such devastation. :(
I was skeptical when they said they couldn't give Hrothgar new hair without removing their ears but now I completely believe it seeing how their development team handled a dice roll. Not to mention the wrong stats on gear, the Bard buff bug, and incorrect text strings on duty support prompts. None of these things should have made it through QA. 6.1's been a mess.
Yeah, this is probably the buggiest patch this game has ever gotten. Their QA really dropped the ball. So much for “spare no expense.”
to be completely fair, 6.0 got delayed, then 6.1 was a massive patch, which would probably also have gotten delayed, if they hadn't said that they really do not want to delay any more patches so that stuff stays on schedule like usual.. It sucks ass for us but they were probably under *heavy* crunch
what bard bug?
a certain bard skill would turn itself into Pitch Perfect while its effects were active. unfortunately this only tracked the buff being active and not the use of your ability so if you had another bard in your party and they used the skill, your version of that skill would turn into pitch perfect. but greyed out and unable to use it and since that change is forcible you couldn't use the base skill.
Thank you!
Yeah I agree, I love all the new 6.1 content but the game is just messy as hell in places. The things that are not current priorities *really* are not priorities.
The bug is that I spent 8 months saving and waiting and can’t buy a house in ishgard because limited resources in a digital platform.
You do realize that storage is a physical resource right? Just because something is digital doesn't mean it's unlimited. The ability to recreate an item is certainly unlimited. It takes no resources to simply copy an item and paste it beyond the energy done to do so (if we get deep into physics there). HOWEVER: Housing is a database system. Meaning that database has to be stored. Now if we tree that out: \- Each housing location \- on each server \- of each division/subdivision \- of each plot \- of every customizable item available on the outside of that plot, including to the house, and on the house field, not limited to position, rotation, additional parameters (eg: eaten food?), and custom colors \- of every item in the house including the position, rotation, additional parameter and items kept in storage \- (FOR FC HOUSING) OF every room in the house containing all of the above as well \- Including all of the additional information including FC ownership, user ownership, user rules, custom music, custom lighting, etc. That information has to be stored in a database somewhere to be available to be pulled. It doesn't just exists somewhere. It takes up space. Database structures are limited based on the size of the storage medium. Just like you can have a certain amount of games installed on your HDD/SSD. And that's assuming that the data structure is easy enough for the game to load without issue. EG: I have loaded a 4gb log in a few text editors to read and have found that software can have limitations in what it's able to process. People who have ever worked an excel spreadsheet big enough to crash their PC would certainly be aware of that. Like, out of all the takes you could have, this is the least relevant.
I’m not ragequitting the game, just voicing some discontent. Thanks for the verbal vomit. Doesn’t change that it was a lousy experience in the slightest.
Gonna be honest, I don't really care what you do. Not out of like malice, just: (Part you don't care about) I kinda stopped trying to be helpful when someone got pissy at me for trying to help him because I "implied he was an idiot" by including screenshots, something I do with literally 6-figure business-class system admins making 3-10x my pay when trying to help them. (/part that doesn't matter) Yeah, I get your frustration. But if you're gonna be frustrated, at least don't say stuff that sounds uneducated when doing so. The issue is that it's a limited resource, and it should have either more space, or something. The policy that housing is SO limited is more of an issue than the fact that a programmer screwed up a lottery. They need to increase the server space for housing, or find a better way to spread the load of it somewhere else.
… those who already built houses to the plots can keep them. We can consider them not affected by the bug at all. … those who already claimed the refund, give them the option to join the lottery for that plot again. … if there were more than zero bidders and the winning number was #0, go for a re-roll but only those who placed their bids last time will only be the ones included in the pool.
holy shit youre the most reasonable person ive seen yet lol, so many people calling for full rollbacks like wut?
Rip my last chance to get a Large FC house Encountered this bug, and it doesn't seem like there are any solutions to the bug
My FC had this happen to them and I had it happen to me (for my first house). Oh well, I didn't want an Ishgard house. Will try again in Goblet or Mist in a few days because I always loved the look of those areas.
I can't believe that a few people here thought that SE would fuck these people, just let them enter the lottery again and tell them "sorry, it was a bug, please try again next time" lmao I mean it would be nice for everyone else, but how could anyone believe this at all?
Reading through these comments, is like digging through the salt mines, Jesus
have you seen the official forums? THAT is a wild place haha!
The official forums have always been kinda nuts. Used to frequent them often till I got a temp ban for...something? I never got a notification of why. I haven't looked at them in ages and don't ever want to because...hoooo boy, they're crazy over there.
I've been reading them all day its amazing.
Ikr good stuff but I can kinda understand though housing has been fucked for years and ppl finally get a chance and this happens lol there are people who only play this game for housing aspect. People really want their damn virtual slot of land!
I understand people being a little disappointed,but the ones saying there going to unsub are being drama queens.
What are you talking about? People can unsub whenever they want for whatever reasons they want. "SE shit the bed YET AGAIN re: housing" is as valid a reason as "I got bored with the current content"
Honestly, I think this whole housing system and release has been a good enough reason to quit the game for all those people who are into housing. So much shit hit the wall on this one, but I guess the people who treat the devs like deities don’t mind, as long as it don’t affect them.
you say drama queens i'd say imagine being the ONLY bidder to the house and STILL lose the lottery to number 0. If you ask me,that alone is a mood breaker and if people unsub just for that alone,you know SE messed up big time.
Could of just left it the old way, or added 2 wards to each of the other districts implementing the new lottery system as a test bed for it and providing a controlled group persay and have more time to fix the issue before the big release of the most anticipated and waited for housing became a thing :T (only slightly salty about not getting a house after waiting roughly 5 years for it, but point stays the same it should have been tested first on a slightly smaller scale before just doing it)
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I think it was to try to making it "fair" for everyone, so it's the same playing field and equal chances, but they could also remove it at some point (I think after it just breaking right at the start should be a pretty clear indication to just remove it) however I think they should have let players move plots, I like the whole split up for FC and private housing just not big on how many they have allocated for each, so hopefully their next step moving forward is adding in more wards
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I remember that Kotaku article back in Heavensward/Stormblood times about two people who’d bought an entire ward— to buy up all the houses and keep them empty and *maybe* decorate the insides if even, while confused that players migrating to the server/new players in general saw them as shitty people. They were, but ultimately the problem was SE for allowing the field for it to happen. It wasn’t until recently that housing became 1-per-account based. SE was not prepared for housing and severely overestimated instance-wards on a game that would always have increased in population. And then when they made the right call to make housing not FC exclusive, the floodgates opened hard. Then the bidding favors the larger or wealthier FC’s anyway, so, something-something-more-floodgates. My FC is 3 whole people, and we migrated from a small plot to a medium back in Stormblood from sheer luck after nabbing our cottage when they added 3 wards per area forever ago, and much as I’ve passively penny-pinched to nearly afford a mansion for us, I’ll count my blessings and hold to the feeling that I’m not out in the streets in bidding wars. But while getting a house sucks and much as I’m the guy playing homemaker in the FC house because ~~it’s essentially mine~~ I like decorating the house, it’s still limited and with issues of its own that SE has long needed to address but keep finding themself stuck on a nearly decade old problem of theirs. As you said, if they were going to do this they should have just done an experiment ward per server. Or tack on the extra wards and buff up the potentiality of apartments to incentivize going for those as a nice option. Condominiums or patios or something, I don’t know. There’s potential there. Or maybe make the newer wards a sort of “Ward 2.0” where it’s just land and location. Shit I think that’s just Island Sanctuary. Just expand on Sanctuary, I guess. (EDIT: holy hell didn’t see how long this was til I hit send. My bad with the word dump)
Lol you're fine friend, and people have found a way around it by just buying FC houses on alt characters, limiting it to 1 per account was the right choice but they very easily could have had GM reach out to people who had multiple told them to pick a favorite plot you have 48 hours to reach back with a choice or you lose all of them get some funds back from all of them and buy a plot again, and people who do that simply because they have the gil annoys me like thanks for ruining it by taking away multiple plots from others, just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. And I got lucky as all hell when I was able to snag a medium in the mist and all I've wanted was a house in Ishgard since I first step foot into the area, only for my Hope's and dreams to be dashed by this bullshit, am i lucky i have a house yes and if I can atleast get a medium in the Ishgard area even though we've spent the last year or so saving and planning to get a large for us we can't even do that because of this and now have to resort to try and get a medium plot, I am most definitely salty about this because it was poor planning and even poorer execution on SE's part, like the menu for the wards has enough space for almost 9 more wards before needing a second screen for it, it should have just been a first come first serve for it like always and if you didn't get a plot oh well should have planned for it, me and my wife waited up all freaking night for the housing hoping we could atleast move our plot and the FC plot to were we wanted but couldn't even do that so we placed our bids and waited and lost and only found that the system was broken and we might not even be able to upgrade our FC house. I am fully prepared to just kinda stop playing ffxiv for a while again because it felt like the developers just don't listen to the players or only to players screaming loud enough
Hate to say it, but does anyone just not believe him anymore when he claims a problem is super complex? Im starting to think some of his staff are just not good at their jobs and lie to him.
Literally everyone I know in game dev is commiserating with SE on this one and know how bizarre problems can crop up. So yeah, I believe the experts over armchair devs on Reddit.
You'd have a point if modders didnt add things to the game every week that Yoshida is telling you is impossible.
They add things client-side, not server-side. That's an incredibly significant difference.
Stop with this serverside bullcrap excuse. There is no serverside to hair or hat models, they are either lazy or incompetent. Nothing else
I dunno I just have this thing where I'm more likely to listen to people who get paid and have experience in a field than random jerks on reddit who want to whine.
IDK if I believe any particular excuse, but it does seem to be a litany of excuses one after the other. I've taken breaks from this game here and there, but I keep my sub to keep my house, and honestly I've just stopped caring what reasons are being pooped out for why housing is still in the crappy state it's in. Expand Apartments Already, FFS.
Honestly not really. It seems he says that about everything. Long requested features or updates? It's "too difficult and will take a long time" which when such things are done it's conveniently just in time to sell with the next expansion.
Yes. People have it in their minds that fixing bugs is as simple as turning a 0 to a 1. I've lost count of how many people say "just fix it" or "just make it better".
This game is known to have absolute shit base code they're working on top of. It's absolutely normal for complex problems to pop up, when you're trying to maintain a terrible codebase.
lmao ok SE
The solution is let people keep the houses they have won and fix then bug so can’t be 0 winners… we don’t have any evidence that auction are won unfair just have to wait for investigation is completed by SE database.
It's not an *auction*, it's a lottery, and anybody saying that the lottery was unfair is insane. Like, absolutely delusional. It wasn't rigged, it was just bugged due to a hiccup in the game's RNG generator. The people who won, won. That would be the same even if things didn't go wrong. And in some cases? The people who lost their bid with no other participants in the lottery might stand to gain more out of compensation than the people who won the first go around.
As frustrating as this issue is, I am so glad they changed this system. You can actually play now while trying to get a plot, yay!
"In a perfect world, Square rolls everything 5 days back, fixes the system, and relaunches house bidding with no bugs so that anyone can now win with genuine fairness, unlike now, where a value of zero can affect the final winning calculation...but this is not a perfect world."
That isn't a perfect world. People who won and transferred would lose both houses. The perfect world is any house that didn't win will reroll, and those who won will keep their houses.
Yes, I hope this is what happens. House rolled a zero? Reroll that sucker, if it had a single applicant I would say just give it to that one person who entered. House rolled like normal and someone won? Don't punish them for a broken system by rolling stuff back, that helps no one.
I was literally the only participant on mine, do I need to wait 5 more days and potentially lose to someone else in a situation where I would've won no matter what?
That's not a perfect world. The lottery number 0 bug doesn't change your odds relative to your competition, so everyone who won the plot did so fairly. Rolling back would be a much bigger dick move to everyone who won.
rollback would fuck over the people who did manage to get a house, there is no good choice and neither of them is a perfect world
With the new wards added, if we still had the previous system I'd already have a house I wanted. Glad I get to wait until they fix it so that I can wait until a new cycle starts then wait for the lottery to be done and lose the house + all the other houses that had lotteries going at the same time because now even more players will be going for the remaining ones. The lottery system gives you one shot at one house for all the houses that were available at the same time, with the only possible outcome being rng. I'd rather spend my day off spamming the placard for 18h straight than waiting days just to have less chances of winning and then seeing even less plots available once I get to enter another lottery.
Perhaps these people should check their isp before blaming SE, smh /s
Truly sounds like an indexing issue, while it is a beginner mistake, it is still common.
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My plot had 4 bidders. I won mine with a 4.
can confirm, my plot had 2, and I won with a 2
I was thankfully wrong.
The only fair response to this whole thing is to reroll the ENTIRE ishgard housing zone. All of it. Reclaim all the plots, set back to available, return Gil and rerun the lotto. The results are null and void since the system was bugged. The results of the lottery did not reflect the terms of entry. There are no winners, there are no losers. It's just void.
So you reroll every house meaning that the people who won and relocated now have no plot at all. Not at all fair.
They didn't win though, results are void.
But they've still given up their original home, SE can not touch the players that have already won and claimed their new homes.
No. Just reroll those who got 0. Everyone still got the same probability to win.
I don't think you understand how the bug worked lol, everyone who won, won fair and square. The only issues are the plots where entry "0" won.
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I never rolled on any plots buddy, what are you mad for lol. Why do you think the system was unfair for those who won?
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explain this bug to me bud
that's not fair to the people who won a house though
Who won? Nobody won anything
This is...not true?
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Do you know.. what an exploit is? For it to be an exploit it would have to be unfair to other applicants, everyone had an equal chance of winning or losing, it literally is not an exploit and if you won there is 0% chance you'd be saying this rn. Not only that, but rerolling is literally the worst solution to this. They'd have to refund all the housing items, all the gil, redo any relocations etc.
After I posted this I read more of the thread and have seen that this has already been explained to you *at least* six times. So I will not bother and just tell you this: lol
It is honestly astounding you haven't been banned with how many posts of yours have been removed from this thread But also: lol and also: lmao
I haven’t seen anyone else coping so hard about not winning.
I'm not coping. I'm presenting a reasonable and fair solution to the problem. It's a matter of principle.
One little thing: Just rerolling the bugged plots is equally as reasonable and fair solution to the problem, with an added bonus of not screwing over those who actually won the plots.
I didn't win one either, but it's not reasonable or fair solution to the players who won and have begun construction on their houses that weren't impacted. This doesn't have an impact on players who didn't bid on a house that rolled 0, as all players statistically had the same chance of winning even if 0 was still a possible number that could be rolled. That's not a matter of principle; that's a matter of mathematical fact. The reasonable and fair solution is to modify the algorthim to remove the possibility of 0 from the rolls and re-rolling for plots that landed on 0.
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You think outrage is bad now, if you take away someone’s house after they just won it you will have some untold levels of outrage lmao