Everyone that entered the lottery should have a second chance - it wasn't fairly done

They need to double the number of wards in every zone and be for private housing only

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Originally Posted by Milus

They need to double the number of wards in every zone and be for private housing only

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That first part is probably significantly easier said than done. It would be nice if the ratio of free company wards to personal ones wasn’t so ridiculously high though.

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Originally Posted by Grems

This isn’t true. Every single auction was wrong. Even if you personally wouldn’t have won, it was done wrong. Every “0” was not counted in every auction. So each auction had someone who would automatically never have stood a chance at winning. Also, that means the winning number was off by 1 person, so it should have been the next highest number if it actually added “0” person in, and if you moved “0” person to an actual spot they should have had, of “1”, then the winner should have been the person who had the number below the winning number as advertised. The whole entire auction was wrong for every single house. The ONLY way to fix that is to wipe the slate clean, reset everyone to where they were with housing right before the auctions began, and redo the first auction.

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That's not what happened at all

Say you have a server here doing the lottery and these are the results

A - entry 3 wins
B - entry 2 wins
C - entry 1 wins

And then on a separate server is the housing data and when it works right, it should look like this

A - entry 3 wins ------------------------------------ A - my new proposed owner is entry 3
B - entry 2 wins ------------------------------------ B - my new proposed owner is entry 2
C - entry 1 wins ------------------------------------ C - my new proposed owner is entry 1

What happened here is this

A - entry 3 wins - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A - error
B - entry 2 wins - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - B - error
C - entry 1 wins - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - C - error

They could have coded it so "error" was just a null but nulls in coding can be seriously bad juju, so instead they coded the error case to return 0 as a default value and assign no winner. But the winners are still recorded on the lottery server and so they can retrieve that data and award the winners their prize appropriately. And they can fix the issue that caused the servers not to communicate so the issue doesn't occur again on future lotteries.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

They could have coded it so "error" was just a null but nulls in coding can be seriously bad juju, so instead they coded the error case to return 0 as a default value and assign no winner. But the winners are still recorded on the lottery server and so they can retrieve that data and award the winners their prize appropriately. And they can fix the issue that caused the servers not to communicate so the issue doesn't occur again on future lotteries.

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The analogy I've used in a few threads so far is that the lottery server has the list of winners, but when it called to to tell the placards who won, sometimes it got a busy signal... and just never left a message or called back. So for the placards it got through to, yay, the results are correct! For the placards it didn't get through to, it still has correct results stored on the lottery server, but it never got around to telling those placards.

What they need to do, in essence, is change things so that the lottery server can be told to basically retry any phone-calls that it didn't get through on, so as to actually tell the remaining placards who their winner is.

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Originally Posted by Milus

They need to double the number of wards in every zone and be for private housing only

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NA and EU have whole new data centers and worlds in the works. Probably wouldn't expect new wards for anywhere until populations balance out again after those come online.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

The analogy I've used in a few threads so far is that the lottery server has the list of winners, but when it called to to tell the placards who won, sometimes it got a busy signal... and just never left a message or called back. So for the placards it got through to, yay, the results are correct! For the placards it didn't get through to, it still has correct results stored on the lottery server, but it never got around to telling those placards.

What they need to do, in essence, is change things so that the lottery server can be told to basically retry any phone-calls that it didn't get through on, so as to actually tell the remaining placards who their winner is.

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Hahah I like the busy signal analogy

You want to be careful with retries, though, because you don't want it to just keep trying into infinity. One of our teams is dealing with exactly that right now because something tried 300 times before someone went "Waaaaaaaaaaaaaait a second"

So probably a limited number of times to retry and then it would still need to throw an error and alert some process that something wasn't working correctly

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

You want to be careful with retries, though, because you don't want it to just keep trying into infinity.

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Oh, do I have Bluetooth-related horror stories about things with... uh... interesting retry behavior.

You're not wrong, though; a simple "okay try sending it again" could create more problems, you'd want to do something like "try again in 5 minutes, if that fails, try again in 15, if that fails, try again in an hour" so that if there's an error state lasting a while -- remote database offline, network switch has died, datacenter has been pulled into an extradimensional vortex, wolves have eaten the network cables, or (least likely of all) you're using SQL Server willingly -- you aren't just pelting it endlessly, but don't entirely give up. Basically, the same sort of re-queue-and-retry logic that (most) e-mail servers use when they can't connect to a remote host. But yeah, there's a point at which you definitely want it to stop retrying, put the results in a "pending" queue to be dealt with manually and start waving a flag going "HELP! HUMAN! I'M NOT SURE WHAT TO DO WITH THESE!"

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

That's not what happened at all

Say you have a server here doing the lottery and these are the results

A - entry 3 wins
B - entry 2 wins
C - entry 1 wins

And then on a separate server is the housing data and when it works right, it should look like this

A - entry 3 wins ------------------------------------ A - my new proposed owner is entry 3
B - entry 2 wins ------------------------------------ B - my new proposed owner is entry 2
C - entry 1 wins ------------------------------------ C - my new proposed owner is entry 1

What happened here is this

A - entry 3 wins - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A - error
B - entry 2 wins - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - B - error
C - entry 1 wins - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - C - error

They could have coded it so "error" was just a null but nulls in coding can be seriously bad juju, so instead they coded the error case to return 0 as a default value and assign no winner. But the winners are still recorded on the lottery server and so they can retrieve that data and award the winners their prize appropriately. And they can fix the issue that caused the servers not to communicate so the issue doesn't occur again on future lotteries.

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This. So much this. Even possible that the error WAS a null, but an INT in most programming languages can't be null so it either errors out (would've crashed the server) or defaults to 0.

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Originally Posted by DragonFlyy

This. So much this. Even possible that the error WAS a null, but an INT in most programming languages can't be null so it either errors out (would've crashed the server) or defaults to 0.

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To elaborate a little on this: NULL is, in many systems, literally just an alias for 0. Things don't crash because the value is NULL. Things crash because anything stored in a computer's memory, when represented as a pointer ("this is where the data is stored", as it points to the spot) is represented as a number (where in memory it is), and if you try to access a memory location which happens to be set to NULL... you're basically saying to go get whatever's at memory location 0. But there's no function there at memory location 0 to call, there's no valid data there to read. So if you use NULL as an address for any sort of memory access, things go boom. This is why a pointer being set to NULL is used to mean "this pointer doesn't point to anything, e.g. is not valid/is empty". That's great, but if you forget to check "is this NULL" before using a pointer...

The program Oops.exe has stopped operating.

In other words, that's how you get a STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION error dialog on Windows, an EXC_BAD_ACCESS on macOS, or a SIGSEGV signal on Linux/UNIX.

But if you assign NULL to an integer... well, NULL is just another way to say 0, so you just get an integer with a value of 0. Perfectly safe.

There are exceptions, of course; "nil" in some languages is a special case, such as how things cannot be nil in some languages unless you tack a '?' on the end of the data type to make it nullable. In those languages, there is a difference between an Int with a value of 0 and an Int? with a value of nil; the first one is explicitly "I contain a value, and it is 0" while the second one is "I contain no value".

But older languages do not make that distinction; "I contain no value" and "I contain a value of 0" are generally the same thing. Hence why a placard containing no value contains (and displays) a value of 0.

they aren't going to undo won homes.

I think the only thing they can do fairly to everyone that was involved is along the lines of
reduce FC exclusive to like 10
open up 3-4 new wards(meaning every district so actually 15-20 + all the vacant small/medium in ishgard 11-18)
give the first lottery exclusivity to those that participated in the nightmare lottery as an apology(people will cry about being not allowed but then again they always do and if they didn't care to enter the first lottery what is their argument?)
then go back to the normal lottery/results pattern they initially intended... with the errors fixed of course

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Originally Posted by Nihility

they aren't going to undo won homes.

I think the only thing they can do fairly to everyone that was involved is along the lines of
reduce FC exclusive to like 10
open up 3-4 new wards(meaning every district so actually 15-20 + all the vacant small/medium in ishgard 11-18)
give the first lottery exclusivity to those that participated in the nightmare lottery as an apology(people will cry about being not allowed but then again they always do and if they didn't care to enter the first lottery what is their argument?)
then go back to the normal lottery/results pattern they initially intended... with the errors fixed of course

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Well, no, because those were all legitimately won. And the 0 was an error in communicating winners. There was no issue with the lottery itself. They know who won what and they're working out how to get those houses into the winner's hands. It's a little complicated by the fact some people have gotten refunds, so they have to figure how to collect gil in those cases.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

It's a little complicated by the fact some people have gotten refunds, so they have to figure how to collect gil in those cases.

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This.

Presumably if no one had refunded their bids, SQEX could've just added code to send the results to the placards again, ensuring that any which didn't get the data now actually received the info on their winner. And -- provided the code now had some more fault-tolerance in the case of issues -- people could then just claim their wins.

(Though to guess from their "if you did win, please claim the plot" request on Lodestone, they probably don't have a list on the lottery-server side of which plots didn't get results, just of all the results for all the plots. Presumably if people whose plots did get the results claim the plot, they can then likely just use "all unclaimed plots" as the target set, thus reducing the number of plots they have to re-send.)

The fact that people took the money out of the placards -- including people who won plots -- almost certainly complicates things immensely. No part of the system is set up to take money outside of accepting bids during the lottery window, but re-opening the lottery on the errored-out plots (to accept bids) would presumably invalidate the existing actual wins. Which would be wildly unfair to the people who were sole bidders, won the plot, but fell prey to the "placard never received the result, so shows 0" issue and thus couldn't claim it. So I would bet gil that's the thing they're trying to solve right now: what can be done to collect the gil from winners and award them the plot that they won even in the cases where they already withdrew the money.

And whatever the solution to that is, it's likely to be something they have to code from scratch.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

sometimes it got a busy signal...

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Someone's showing their age...<3

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Originally Posted by Illmaeran

Someone's showing their age...<3

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*laugh*

I honestly couldn’t think of a better analogy off-the-cuff, I fear. I considered working with a traffic jam to represent an IO bottleneck, but…

(Besides, I told myself “analog” is part of analogy, and so that justifies it!)

Yes. It was fair. They'v already said this. The houses that got rolled on PROPERLY were done within the system. The ones that 0'd out HAVE WINNERS but the system didn't register it and that's what being fixed. You lost. Move on and come to terms with that

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Well, no, because those were all legitimately won. And the 0 was an error in communicating winners. There was no issue with the lottery itself. They know who won what and they're working out how to get those houses into the winner's hands. It's a little complicated by the fact some people have gotten refunds, so they have to figure how to collect gil in those cases.

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how is that not good?
people feel spited
people are quitting for not getting a home
people think SE is just saying what they think will appease the masses
there's screenshots on reddit of small houses having over 200 bids so clearly demand is very high

CN and korea have already shown that there are actually 30 wards so open some more up, get people in houses.
The barren landscape in FC wards shows they don't need so much so get those houses moving too

and go even farther than that. Put in suite and penthouse options in the apartments to upgrade the floor plan to single story house and mansion. Add an instanced rooftop garden and basement workshop so anyone has access to those features


No one loses their home, people that feel spited get a second chance without the zeros to blame their pain on and more homes on the market for people looking in the future. I can't see a downside

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

*laugh*
(Besides, I told myself “analog” is part of analogy, and so that justifies it!)

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Not too long ago I called someone on a cell number and got a busy signal. Thinking nothing of it I hung up and tried back later only to get the busy signal again. Only after trying again the next day and getting the signal yet again did it occur to me that I was calling a *cell phone* with voice mail and a busy signal likely meant something was wrong. I called their land line and got through no problem.

I'm just glad I've never tried dialing by rotary on my cell....derp.


Yes, analog's in analogy, so you're clear!

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Originally Posted by Nihility

how is that not good?
people feel spited
people are quitting for not getting a home
people think SE is just saying what they think will appease the masses
there's screenshots on reddit of small houses having over 200 bids so clearly demand is very high

CN and korea have already shown that there are actually 30 wards so open some more up, get people in houses.
The barren landscape in FC wards shows they don't need so much so get those houses moving too

and go even farther than that. Put in suite and penthouse options in the apartments to upgrade the floor plan to single story house and mansion. Add an instanced rooftop garden and basement workshop so anyone has access to those features


No one loses their home, people that feel spited get a second chance without the zeros to blame their pain on and more homes on the market for people looking in the future. I can't see a downside

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Just because you think it's some housing conspiracy and SE doesn't really have valid winners for each plot people that won fair and square according to SE should have a high chance of losing their plot by entering a lottery reroll?
No.
I won my plot, SE has stated that the rolls were correct and that the remaining correct winners will get their plot once they fixed it. Everyone who lost, lost. Period. There is no 0 to blame, that's lottery life for you and everyone who entered knew they have a very small chance of winning. If they quit because they can't deal with rng, that's on them. I have absolutely no empathy for people whining in hopes of depriving people that legitimately won of their plots so they can have another chance with a reroll if that is really what you are suggesting.

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Originally Posted by Nihility

how is that not good?
people feel spited
people are quitting for not getting a home
people think SE is just saying what they think will appease the masses
there's screenshots on reddit of small houses having over 200 bids so clearly demand is very high

CN and korea have already shown that there are actually 30 wards so open some more up, get people in houses.
The barren landscape in FC wards shows they don't need so much so get those houses moving too

and go even farther than that. Put in suite and penthouse options in the apartments to upgrade the floor plan to single story house and mansion. Add an instanced rooftop garden and basement workshop so anyone has access to those features


No one loses their home, people that feel spited get a second chance without the zeros to blame their pain on and more homes on the market for people looking in the future. I can't see a downside

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It's not bad to give suggestions on how to make more private housing available. And I've seen mentioned that they may adjust the FC/private distribution after they see how things are working.

But that doesn't change anything about how the lottery wasn't broken. Some of those people who feel spited may have actually won their house. They know who the winners are. There's no reason to reroll anything or give anyone exclusivity in any new rolls. They just need time to get the winner's houses in their hands. And as I mentioned, that's complicated by the idea they still have to collect gil and in some cases that gil isn't deposited anymore.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

It's not bad to give suggestions on how to make more private housing available. And I've seen mentioned that they may adjust the FC/private distribution after they see how things are working.

But that doesn't change anything about how the lottery wasn't broken. Some of those people who feel spited may have actually won their house. They know who the winners are. There's no reason to reroll anything or give anyone exclusivity in any new rolls. They just need time to get the winner's houses in their hands. And as I mentioned, that's complicated by the idea they still have to collect gil and in some cases that gil isn't deposited anymore.

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seriously? did you even read what I wrote? and by the amount of replies... did anyone?
I said add more wards and open up a chunk of the FC only wards for anyone to roll on... I even said they're "NOT" going to take away already won homes

If you give people a second chance without the bug they lose the excuse that SE is screwing with them... We need a ton more housing anyways. Why is the thought of that met with such friction? I don't understand it at all

I didn't even try... I like my house but I have a lot of FC mates that are pissed off

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Originally Posted by Nihility

seriously? did you even read what I wrote? and by the amount of replies... did anyone?
I said add more wards and open up a chunk of the FC only wards for anyone to roll on... I even said they're "NOT" going to take away already won homes

If you give people a second chance without the bug they lose the excuse that SE is screwing with them... We need a ton more housing anyways. Why is the thought of that met with such friction? I don't understand it at all

I didn't even try... I like my house but I have a lot of FC mates that are pissed off

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Adding more wards depends on SE's ability to get more server hardware and renegotiate contracts to get more physical space in the locations hosting the data center hardware. That's not a simple and straightforward task, especially when said arrangements have to be made for 5 different locations handled by 5 different contracts.

They've already told us that they will change ward designations as needed in the future. I doubt they're going to do it until at least 3-4 lottery periods have passes to make reasonably certain that all FCs currently looking have gotten their house. Their need to fix the lottery bug is going to delay just how soon that can happen.

As for the game in CN/KR, it's published/operated by separate companies that have been given a license by SE to do so. How they run and monetize the game in those countries does not mirror how SE runs it in JP/NA/EU/OCE. Trying to use it as a comparison point does not work.

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Originally Posted by Nihility

If you give people a second chance without the bug they lose the excuse that SE is screwing with them... We need a ton more housing anyways. Why is the thought of that met with such friction? I don't understand it at all

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There is absolutely no legitimacy to the idea that SE is screwing with anyone in this besides someone's own conspiracy theory ideas. SE has been transparent about what happened. If someone chooses not to believe that, that's on them.

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Originally Posted by Anger

Think about this for a second. If you entered an IRL lottery but someone added additional numbers that were not actual entrants wouldn't that be wrong and immoral? For example if ten people enter the lottery but there are an additional two "fake tickets" or even one fake ticket we would all agree that isn't fair and shifts the odds against us.

Now moving on, imagine if the lottery had errors that didn't properly choose any winner whatsoever (There were no participants in the lottery). We would find that to be suspicious and unfair would we not?

Imagine if someone were doing a giveaway and the entry was zero or strange messages were coming up like the ones we're seeing. It wouldn't be deemed fair.

My point is, the lottery was not fairly ran by any means. We do not know how the system picks a winner but what we do know it added an additional entry of "Zero" to every single house lottery. We know that the system is not operating properly. We know strange messages sometimes come up and deprive anyone of winning.

A casino wouldn't allow a slot machine to remain on the floor in this case or perhaps a dealer adding cards to a game of blackjack - or any other game.

This has to be done fairly and with full transparency. I believe that the lottery should be redone entirely for every house in every Empyreum ward AFTER it is properly fixed and ready.

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This class is why you read the updates like a good vet and not a sprout. They explained the lotto itself worked flawlessly it was communicating results to the server. No one actually rolled a zero, the server that communicates results said you did and wouldn't give permissions. However you actually rolled a number. And it wasn't until they patched it that the server properly relayed that number. Furthermore it was only some that did some that didn't. Mine didn't I even screenshotted it. I rolled a 3 and my friend also rolled a 3 on another home. As we were the third applicants. Worked fine, got permissions finalized purchase. Some people got a 0 despite being the sole applicant. Those people got their homes as no competition. For those with competition but rolled a zero I believe they all re-enter but it's possible that the actual high roller got the house.

If it were an issue of the actual randomizer glitching and across the board then I could see doing a mass re-roll but that would simply be on the theoretical principle... Add in those like myself who didn't have any problems and won and have already invested a ton of gil into it. Doing a re-roll now would be a PR suicide and require a godly amount of compensation. They aren't going to do that. They have already made it clear they aren't as they don't want that PR scandal. Even if it worked flawlessly without the 0 display glitch you'd still have people finding a way to bitch about fairness and questioning the system.

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Originally Posted by KurohNeko

For those with competition but rolled a zero I believe they all re-enter but it's possible that the actual high roller got the house.

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Based on the Lodestone posts, there is an actual winner who was picked in the lottery for every plot, the actual high-roller does still get the house, it's literally just that the placards never got the phonecall/received the mail/whatever analogy you want here, so had no data to display. The mailbox, as it were, was empty.

Also based on the Lodestone posts, the factor complicating any fix is that some people who did win withdrew the gil for their bid, and the system has zero existing provision on how to collect gil for the housing plot when it's no longer "in the placard", for lack of a better term. And it sounds like SQEX -- quite rightly -- does not want to invalidate the wins for people who withdrew their gil thinking they hadn't won due to an issue on SQEX's side of things... which means they have to figure out a good way to collect the gil from those winners in a sane, automated, stable fashion. (E.g., something that does not make the situation worse.)