The lotto winner.... number ZERO? Are you serious???

I'm sorry, but they make too much money off this game for shit to be this broken and frankly, this disrespectful of the players' time. These are the moments that make you question why you are investing so much time and money into this game when there are plenty of alternatives that do not disrespect your time like this. You get people excited for Ishgard housing while selling your expac, even though its not coming out for 4 months after the expac is out. You then get people excited to login on patch day, find a plot they like and bid on it. Keep them on pins and needles for the next 5 days, constantly checking to see if there are other bids. Then when the actual day comes, you get this?

They get too much goodwill and praise off this game, but deserve to be absolutely raked over the coals for this. Imagine some other MMO doing this?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SasaTheFloof

On my server, the placard said that the winner is number 6, so it's not a universal issue it seems

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It seems to mostly be an issue where only one FC bid on a property

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...96/unknown.png

Yeah sure, everything checks out

What.... How can you lose to the number 0?

Why would the minimum value be 0...? How can one be the only participant and have only a 50/50 chance?

Attached is an image link. It is completely safe, I am just unsure how to embed it into here:

https://imgur.com/a/9lJfrzn

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes.../blog/4999694/

https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/acc...e7651b837a.jpg

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Originally Posted by Aeika

Since a few people actually won, I HIGHLY doubt it will be rerolled :(

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They wouldn't need to reroll every entry. Just the ones that had no winner. They should have logs of every ticket. But yeah, wishful thinking.

It's just crap because if we have to do a second lottery it means all the people who lost the first lotteries to other people and not the 0 roll are going to pile onto the houses that didn't have winners. It's especially bad on OCE because we were forced to wait for housing then forced into the lottery system only to find out that it doesn't even work properly.

Pfffhahahahahaahahahaha

Like I said, just give up until SE pulls their head from their ass.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sclair0

It seems to mostly be an issue where only one FC bid on a property

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yeah, because they started counting at 0, not 1. It's an intern level programming mistake.

All the people who won, didn't actually win, the person 1 ticket higher than them did.

This is the most basic part of the whole system and I can't believe that this issue wouldn't have shown up in tests if they'd simulated a whole server's worth of lotteries. Our FC had the only two bids in on a large plot and 0 won. I can only assume they'll ask everyone to re-enter in 4 days' time once they've patched this elementary-level bug, but that seems unfair for those who would have won plots fair and square if this had worked as intended.

So much for the lottery improving the house-buying process.

Nice housing system you have there, SE.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...49/unknown.png

I guess, it is this programming error:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error

Ohh maaaan ...


Cheers

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shibi

yeah, because they started counting at 0, not 1. It's an intern level programming mistake.

All the people who won, didn't actually win, the person 1 ticket higher than them did.

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Are you sure thats the case? Cause we're also getting messages like "There are no participants in the lottery" and nobody seems to be claiming the plots with the zero errors.

Be still my poor thumping heart. Holy moly.

This is the worst really, this mean their random function is broken, so even for houses where the winning number is not 0, the winner might not be the one it was supposed to be..
Devs seriously, cant make a proper random function?? this is one the most most basic thing wth..

I wonder if there is house where the winner was the last entry or if those had no chance at all ( for example if there was 8 applicant, and the random function pull a number between 0 and 7 instead of 1 and 8, this was lost from the start.. )

Now most plots will be taken, with only 6 wards left for personnal housing.. chances of getting a house have never been lower.. TY SE..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shibi

yeah, because they started counting at 0, not 1. It's an intern level programming mistake.

All the people who won, didn't actually win, the person 1 ticket higher than them did.

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Which is hilariously awful, as then I should have won my lottery as I lost by 1, and my girlfriend should have lost hers and the person 1 ticket below her should have won, so if that is the case, what is SE gonna do? Vacate all results, relocate all the properties back to where they were and redo the auction from scratch? Absolute hilarity.

Same problem here. Only me and another FC member bid on that plot. I took back my money because I was scared and angry. I also sent a bug report. I hope they'll do something about it fast.

http://ibb.co/BZ0MJn7

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Saranys

They need to do an instant redo of the lottery for every house that had multiple bids, and give the houses to the people who were the only ones on certain houses. To do anything else would be a slap in the face...

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Then they might have to reroll all of them. that wouldn't be fair to people who did win.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lecru

Most likely be rolled back. And proper coding implemented. With same winners as before

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I'd like to think that'd be the case. Roll back selectively for those who didn't get a plot at all despite there being participants. And let people who were lucky enough to not get screwed over keep the house they won.

Because if I had lost mine to other people, I'd be fine with it. C'est la vie, しょうがない, that's how RNG works.

But I lost to RNG itself. Why are we competing against the system? Only one person applied to houses, how did we not only lose to a mysterious 0th person, but also get told no one participated at all? Then why are you giving me my money back, Square? If I didn't participate in it?

Still. Just report this as a bug, it's what I did.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RobynDaBank

This is extremely sad to see. I feel worse for people who were the only ones to bid and STILL lost than my own loss today. Way to have hopes crushed. I'd suggest not to accept the refund.

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They won't be the only bidder next time around, they will be crushed even harder by people trying to get a plot. It is chaos.

I don't think incompetence is a strong enough word for this

Quote:

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What.... How can you lose to the number 0?

Why would the minimum value be 0...? How can one be the only participant and have only a 50/50 chance?

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Arrays start from 0. Usually when you program some kind of random draw, you either match up the entries to start from 0 and display 0+1 in the text or exclude 0 from the result selection. In this case it looks like they forgot to exclude 0 from the entry list when someone put in a ticket, so now it displays "no participants" since the plots that did have 0 entries would return that string.

There's also a theory that the hotfix bugged out the entries that were submitted prior.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kahl

Devs seriously, cant make a proper random function?? this is one the most most basic thing wth..

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Making good random numbers is very very hard. That is the reason why all serious cryptographic libraries put a huge effort into it. It is not so basic. :)


Cheers

Many people could have come with a "Told you so" on these forums, it's not even funny.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HeyMcFly

you should screen it and take your money-bc you can lose your money if it's not claimed after a certain time

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They wouldn't dare to continue as is ...... They have to fix this bug now ... It will compound the problems if they take my money while things are still in a state of flux.

The first time I got to bid on a house, or even had a chance of getting one, I lost because of a bug.
Feels bad.

Boy oh boy, I knew there would be something wrong with the lottery system, but didn't think it would get this awful lol.

Same problem, got 0 as the winning number when the only participants in this were our own 3 fc members as still seen in "current participants:3" :confused:

https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/acc...410.1645132336
https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/acc...410.1645132336

Happened to several friends as well as me. Most of us had no competition in the lottery. Only I and a few others took the refund before logging bug tickets. Seriously SE award the win to zero plus 1 even if you need to ask those who took the refund to pay again or reset a one day auction.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shibi

yeah, because they started counting at 0, not 1. It's an intern level programming mistake.

All the people who won, didn't actually win, the person 1 ticket higher than them did.

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You can't make that claim, because in some cases the final entry will have won, i.e. the plot got 6 bids and it went to no. 6
You could claim the all lotteries were invalid because every one had an additional void ticket, but that's arbitrary and the fact that winners have already been able to claim and build means they're never going to roll it back.

Ultimately, it just means that if you bid with say 3 other people, you didn't have a 25% chance at winning, you had a 20% chance at winning, but if you won, then you still won.

It does seem like every lottery just had an extra 'void' ticket, because the 0's seem to have occured in line with that. FC wards with virtually no one bidding had a much higher 0 rate, which would make sense, they're 50% of all of the plots with only 1 bidder. While my private ward had an average of 5 bids per plot, and only about 1/5th-1/6th got zero'ed.

Nothing is ultimately lost, those plots are still available to reroll next cycle, it's just that the parameters were something other than what we were told they were. Which is still bad and very annoying, but no one "lost" anything, so there's nothing to hotfix or roll back. Those plots are lost, let them go.
Hopefully they make the changes to it for the next cycle so that 0 isn't an option.

Between the Hrothgar and Viera issues and now this, it really just feels like Square is waiting until last minute to get any work done and is just rushing out what they have like submitting an assignment five minutes before midnight.

How utterly, utterly absurd. Indie company, guys.

Our FC bid put three out of three bids on Ishgard ward 5 plot 54 on Faerie (so we should have won) but no... 0 won. Praying that SE fixes this so that we don't have to sit through ANOTHER lottery praying someone doesn't come along and try to snap up the plot that we by rights should have won. >.<

Seriously?! No one won! Everyone got the message that “The winning number is… 0. May you have better luck in the future!
But no one won the lottery?!?!

It seems like Thursday's emergency maintenance is the cause of the commotion.

I haven't done a full survey, but I asked around people who won their plots, and they all placed their bids AFTER the maintenance.

We have #0 ticket as winner despite being 6 on the lottery. We bought it before the maintenance

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Making good random numbers is very very hard. That is the reason why all serious cryptographic libraries put a huge effort into it. It is not so basic. :)


Cheers

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IMO if it was hard they should have put extra care into making sure it works. If it didn't, push ahead the lottery system release - maybe even Empyreum as a whole. I really think they just didn't test it out well enough or at all.

If entering the lottery and the results would happen both in a 24 hours window, I could get the point of the possibility of no one being able to win. But more than a week window for no winners is dumb.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ravensong

Our FC bid put three out of three bids on Ishgard ward 5 plot 54 on Faerie (so we should have won) but no... 0 won. Praying that SE fixes this so that we don't have to sit through ANOTHER lottery praying someone doesn't come along and try to snap up the plot that we by rights should have won. >.<

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You know it won't happen... they will force another lottery and you will have to compete not only with new people, but all the people that lost on same plot in other wards and other plots that they tried to get in on... It will NOT be fair at all.

At this point, if they don't fix it, most of our FC will be unsubbing.

Frankly, what is even more surprising at this point, is the amount of winning number being "0" at all.

I hope at the very least they make this issue canon, like they did when the firmaments couldnt be accessed.

Holy fuck, my sides. Just when you thought the devs couldn't be any more incompetent.

"May you have better luck in the future!"

That's like a new meme in the making.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Making good random numbers is very very hard. That is the reason why all serious cryptographic libraries put a huge effort into it. It is not so basic. :)


Cheers

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This is not a question of "true" randomness, it's a question of choosing a random integer between 1 and the number of lottery tickets. It's literally one line of code. This is a mistake that should not have happened and any beginner programmer could have done better. Frankly, this is unworthy of a multi billion dollar company.