PSA/ALERT: Houses are getting demolished when they shouldn't. SE needs to see this!

[Wolftamer]

I don't think that's true at all. It's a old meme at this point that SE only cares about JP community.
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I dunno. JP gets a hurricane they shut down Auto Demolition within a few days. US gets hit hard by a few and it took over a month of the community begging for them to finally shut down the timer on the NA servers. I think there is still a certain bias.

[Wolftamer]

So has anyone who has a house checked your demolition timer lately?

It's maybe possible that, somehow, since they disabled the timers on the Japanese side recently, the timers have just stopped refreshing. i.e., they're just counting down and never resetting back to full time.

This is one of the really stupid parts about the demolition timer....there is no way to view it. The emails are all you get. You can't view it in game, mog station, anything like that. You are completely up to trusting SE on the timer.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

This is one of the really stupid parts about the demolition timer....there is no way to view it. The emails are all you get. You can't view it in game, mog station, anything like that. You are completely up to trusting SE on the timer.

Literally 2 posts above you is a post with a picture of the timer in game....

[Wolftamer]

They stopped NA/EU last year when there was a disaster (Florida I think, excuse this European not keeping up to date with the news). Though I'm a little surprised they haven't stopped them in NA due to the California fires.

They did, but they didn't do it until about a month or so after they hit. It took a lot of begging by the community to finally get SE to do something.

[Optinator]

Welp I lost my Lavender Beds cottage. No warning email whatsoever. I basically use it as my home base and this time it was just gone. Submitted a bug report but.. yeah, not getting my hopes up. I'm not fuming angry or anything, but this is a serious issue that needs looking into, no? Or is housing that much of an afterthought now?

[Wolftamer]

Literally 2 posts above you is a post with a picture of the timer in game....

Yeah, I forgot it does appear if you are in the 10 day window. You cannot see it until then though (which is still stupid and still putting a lot of trust in SE).

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Yeah, I forgot it does appear if you are in the 10 day window. You cannot see it until then though (which is still stupid and still putting a lot of trust in SE).

I mean, if you aren't in your house at least once a week, why would you need one to begin with? I hang out in mine all the time.

[InkstainedGwyn]

I am curious, as it was mentioned before about retainers, etc.... can we pin a common denominator in the demolished houses? Would it be something like "accessing your retainers inside"?

[Amira]

Drinking my coffee, reading stories about this issue (not only here but on reddit as well), and my heart goes out to anyone that this has affected.

As someone who's main reason for subbing is to maintain a house that I've poured RL time and RL money towards, this is terrifying. I wasn't a crafter, I had no IG way to make fast gil, and through effort and some charitable donations from friends, I saved up enough to purchase my small plot, which was a huge gaming milestone for me. I remember the day I bought it, logging out right in front of that plot before maintenance, not getting any sleep so I can log in as soon as servers were back up. Even before they added the basements, I didn't think twice about dropping what was my entire nest egg on my house.

I was so happy, even now - years later, I still sit in my humble little garden and reminisce of old friends visiting me (who have since unsubbed), cooking food before raiding, perfecting my rotation on my training dummy, visiting houses in the neighborhood, watching the plot next to me go up, then get demo'd, then a new one go back up. I wonder then how many of us have these same feelings, same memories, same attachments to our houses, our friends houses, our FC's houses. Doesn't matter if it's a mansion, or a small one, doesn't matter if your decor was years in the making or you simply need a place to put all those event posters SE seems to love giving us (THEY DON'T MATCH ANYTHING! >.<). To think that a bug in game, or a flaw in a code, could rob a player of all those feelings, of all that time, and ESPECIALLY of all that money both in-game and in real life, is heart wrenching.

I personally would have little reason to log in and maintain my sub.

There's a content drought till September and even when a new flood of content, a new expansion, whatever, comes out - I would be homeless in game, I would have lost a place I return to, a place I log out of. I would have lost my altar to Minfilia, my altar to Papalymo, even my altar to the Sultana (before it wasn't needed anymore). I would have lost a home I shared with my in game husband who is also my real life one.

I highly doubt the people who have reported losing their houses out of nowhere are making it up, they've submitted tickets, they've called GM's, they've called hotlines, they've reached out. If it happens that they've fabricated this whole thing then shame on them, but even if there's a chance, however minute, that this could affect ANY of us, at ANY time, without warning, this should be looked into, this should be a concern for all of us. Think deeply about the IG homes you own, or your FC owns, or those who's homes you've visited. Maybe you've written on their guest book, maybe you've practiced on their own training dummy, maybe you've wanted to burn down their outdoor decoration for bringing down the property values of the neighborhood (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!).

There's ultimately a person (people) behind that avatar who owns that house, so let's try to not only be sympathetic, but also escalate this, sticky this, bring some light into this issue. Just because millions of players haven't experienced it, it doesn't mean it couldn't affect you. We don't want to have to wait until 5 people becomes 50 or becomes 500, before this becomes "real".

[Louvain]

I dunno. JP gets a hurricane they shut down Auto Demolition within a few days. US gets hit hard by a few and it took over a month of the community begging for them to finally shut down the timer on the NA servers. I think there is still a certain bias.

It did not take over a month. It took only a few days for them to acknowledge it after I made the thread, and the week after they patched it in.
Edit; Yoshi-p's direct response to the thread, placed about 4 days after it was started; http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...32#post4402932

Ontopic;
The amount of "are you SURE it wasn't on the housing demo?" has been a repeated, annoying question. The people who make these kind of threads are very well aware, you would know if someone lost their house to timer demo and would not know it as the question would be phrased of "hey, haven't been on in a while and my house is gone!"

For those affected, I hope you get some sort of compensation. I'd be devastated if I lost my house. There have also been known issues about demo timer emails not going out properly, which has caused issues.