The housing lottery was not fair due to bugged random function

Since all plots had extra participant 0 then every real persons probability of winning a plot was lower than intended, meaning not 1/number of participants but 1/(1+number of participants).

Having buggy lottery award plots makes the entire thing a mockery.
Since people already took their houses (some of which they weren't supposed to win, with fair random function another participant should have gotten them) rollback is now impossible.

And reopening the plots for next round will sure feel nice for people that lost to number 0.

The only thing Square Enix can to do to fix this mess in my eyes is to delay Island Sanctuary feature until they rework it into instanced housing.

Normal housing would be pointless if Island Sanctuary was a complete replacement for it. Its better they address housing as is, rather than changing a piece of content into something its not.

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Originally Posted by Raim

Normal housing would be pointless if Island Sanctuary was a complete replacement for it. Its better they address housing as is, rather than changing a piece of content into something its not.

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This depends a bit on what island sanctuary is. There are versions of Harvest-Moon-Esque content that would end up fitting fine as a psuedo-new housing system.

Im not sure it'd make normal housing pointless (especially for free companies), its still fun to have neighborhoods, people like cosmetic decorations and stuff. It'd be a bit redundant but it wouldn't make it pointless.

But yes if it is substantially different to housing (e.g. no placable objects. No visits from friends) there's no point trying to turn it into housing.

There's a chance that's the case, but the number of players who lost their plot to number 0 is a little TOO high for the chances of it to be a simple coding issue.

Most likely, what actually happened is that the system ended up being overloaded with the number of processes it had to run for calculating the winners, and crashed midway. There is usually a failsafe to prevent the whole system from crashing altogether. While it can't output a null value, it most likely defaulted to 0. This meant while some winners were processed, other plots just outputted a winner being 0.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

There's a chance that's the case, but the number of players who lost their plot to number 0 is a little TOO high for the chances of it to be a simple coding issue.

Most likely, what actually happened is that the system ended up being overloaded with the number of processes it had to run for calculating the winners, and crashed midway. There is usually a failsafe to prevent the whole system from crashing altogether. While it can't output a null value, it most likely defaulted to 0. This meant while some winners were processed, other plots just outputted a winner being 0.

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Your theory seems to be false, as 50% of single bidders seem to have lost to 0, while this is far less common for housing wards which had many participant, so the random function was indeed bugged.

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Originally Posted by Somnolence

Your theory seems to be false, as 50% of single bidders seem to have lost to 0, while this is far less common for housing wards which had many participants.

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Source? There are LOTS of FCs that had multiple bidders that got a 0 winner.

There are reports that the real culprit is something to do with recent emergency maintenance. Bids made before the maintenance seem to have been made invalid, while those after are working fine.

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Originally Posted by Nabby

Source? There are LOTS of FCs that had multiple bidders that got a 0 winner.

There are reports that the real culprit is something to do with recent emergency maintenance. Bids made before the maintenance seem to have been made invalid, while those after are working fine.

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If what you say is true this makes this magnitudes worse, its one thing having extra ball in a pot but throwing some amount of the bids is akin to dictator throwing some votes for opponents in election rigged.