Finally, some good housing news. Final Fantasy XIV has been in a bit of a housing crisis with its new lottery system bugging out for many players when it went live with the recent Patch 6.1. We’ve been documenting this ongoing saga quite closely. Last we heard, director and producer Naoki Yoshida said the FFXIV team figured out a solution and were in the middle of testing it. Well, the verification process is done and the fixes will roll out soon, according to the latest post by Yoshida-san on The Lodestone.
UPDATE (5/14/2022) by weekend editor Andrea Shearon: In another Lodestone announcement, Yoshida-san has confirmed that FFXIV housing lottery result data will be restored on May 16. This process will display the correct data for winning lottery numbers and lift suspensions on purchasing and relocating plots. Players have until Thursday, May 26 at 7:59 a.m. PT to finalize their land purchase, another lottery cycle begins immediately after that. Unclaimed plots return to the available pool for players to bid on in the new cycle, so don’t forget to check if you thought you lost the initial drawing.
As for folks who thought they lost thanks to that “winning number 0” bug and accepted their Gil refund, Yoshida-san reassured the “ability to finalize the purchase of a won plot will remain unaffected.” So, it doesn’t matter if you got your deposit back, go and check your plots anyway just to make sure you weren’t the real winner. That also means players who received a refund won’t wind up paying anything for their plot, as FFXIV has no plans for revoking funds from your coin purse. Apparently, Patch 6.2 will implement an NPC where “you may voluntarily return the deposit you were accidentally refunded,” but there’s no penalty for pocketing the millions.
The next lottery cycle, scheduled for May 26 at 8:00 a.m. PT, should begin as intended. Players will have the five-day entry period and four-day result period to sort their land affairs and keep the cycle going. Here’s to hoping it goes off without a hitch, but we’ll keep things updated should any changes arise in this next result period.
UPDATE (5/16/2022) by editor Michael Higham: The maintenance period has passed and the update is now live. Congrats to the newly minted winners of the first FFXIV housing lottery.
The original story, published on 4/28/2022, continues: The FFXIV housing lottery fixes are set to go live on May 16 — this will require an all-Worlds maintenance period of up to 10 hours. Until then, housing purchases and relocation will remain suspended, which has been the case since the recent launch of Patch 6.11. Not only will this housing update fix the lottery system, but it will also restore the original data and correct lottery results from the first round. This means those who lost their bid for a housing plot with the infamous “The winning number is 0” message still have a chance.
However, proper data restoration is the part that’s holding up the rollout. It requires additional testing on an internal server environment and, as Yoshida-san says, “the creation of such conditions is subject to factors beyond our control.” Therefore, they require eight business days to complete and verify the fixes before implementing them. Yoshida-san also states in the blog post, “I sincerely apologize that this time extends beyond our original estimate for how long fixes would take, but as preventing further issues is our priority, it is necessary in order to ensure that data restoration procedures can be thoroughly tested.”
The bugged housing lottery results left several players out to dry, including those who were the only ones to enter a lottery for a specific housing plot. Players could not draw the number “0,” yet it was the “winning number” drawn in a number of lotteries; they would also get the message, “There were no participants in this lottery.” Therefore, those players, unfortunately, lost to no one but the server. Somewhere in the lottery system, the data did not get properly relayed to the server, which led to the glitched results. You truly hated to see it. Hopefully, this doesn’t happen again.
Many other players won their respective lotteries, though. Due to the purchasing freeze, they were urged to claim their plot and finalize the purchase before Patch 6.11 went live. Congrats to y’all. And if you were able to move into the brand-new Ishgardian housing district, The Empyreum, and spot a poorly disguised Ser Aymeric as a blue elephant, congrats again.
Be sure to catch up on our previous stories about the FFXIV housing lottery bugs. And once the process gets going again, read up on how the housing lottery works, if you’re interested in getting a house someday (in the game, that is).
