Final Fantasy 14’s broken housing lottery will get fixed soon

Final Fantasy 14 developers say they’ve figured out what was glitching the MMO’s housing lottery and will be correcting the problem shortly. Naoki Yoshida (producer and director) said the good news is that results of lottery draws from over the last week were preserved. They can then be used during scheduled server maintenance.

Additionally, players who won a housing plot in a lottery without bugs or problems won’t be forced to redo the process or enter another lottery. Yoshida asked players who have been granted a housing plot in a lottery to take it back immediately, to ensure that maintenance goes smoothly.

On April 12, patch 6.1 introduced the glitch, which altered the process of granting housing plots in the game. Before, everything was first-come/first-served, requiring players to sit through some ungodly waiting times before trying to buy a house. Over a period of nine days, the lottery will randomly award plots to winners. Five days are allotted to players to fill out an empty plot. Then a drawing will be held, and the winning player is randomly selected.

Instead, users reported the lottery spit out “winners” with the number 0 (supposedly impossible under the system) or did not award the plot to anyone. Another example is when a single participant entered the lottery to win a plot but was not informed that there had been a winner.

Yoshida on Saturday acknowledged the problems and apologized for the frustration they’ve caused. Yoshida also provided a more detailed explanation of how or should the lottery work. The housing lottery is a “plain randomization method,” but because players may have multiple characters on the same account, the game must set complicated conditions for whether they may enter, or win, the lottery. Developers spent all weekend trying to figure out what was going on in the lottery that led to the glitched outcomes.

Meantime, the “result announcement period,” for the first lottery, originally expected to end on Wednesday, will now be extended to an unspecified time. Further, the developers aren’t holding any new lotteries until the problems with the first one is fixed.

How to buy a home Final Fantasy 14 “has always been an awful experience,” says Polygon’s official guide. As the Empyreum new housing area opens in-game, this housing lottery change will be made. This guide provides more information about how this process should work.

Square Enix created 720 new plots each server in order to maintain a high demand. It effectively doubled the amount of housing available, which had been increased by Square Enix last year. At the height of the pandemic, the game placed a moratorium on in-world evictions (and demolitions) if players couldn’t maintain their properties.