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

[Aoi_Futaba]

Just a reminder anything less than rerolling the lottery for the unclaimed plots is unacceptable regardless of whether people got their bid back or not.

Yes but it should ONLY be the original bidders, not an open reroll that new people can join, just the people that were in the plot's lottery originally

[Lihtleita]

Ha, that's not the point. But hey what did I expect from the forums.

what was your point then? from where I'm standing it makes more sense for a large house to go to an fc with 100 members instead of 4 members.
this system also favours legitimate fcs instead of people who make dummys with only one member for the purpose of getting a house.

[TaleraRistain]

See the issue with this response from them is it tells us nothing, it doesn't stop people worrying or clarify anything other than what we already know which is they messed up. How can they not understand that right now what we need is for them to tell us what they intend to do about the issue. How they fix the bug/error and what they look into regarding the cause is not our concern. Something as simple as saying 'All returned 0 results will be rerolled with the original bidders' or 'If you were the only bidder and it returned 0 you have won, we just need time to implement it, thanks for your patience'

I think the answer there is they don't know. They don't know what caused it yet. I don't imagine they know what measures they can implement yet then either.

I get it. I had to wait a month after 6.0 for them to fix an audio issue that made all the music in the game stutter. They weren't great at communicating about things. So by all means call them out on that. But just understand that knowing you have a bug in software doesn't mean you always know instantly what to do about it.

[Norwynn]

I mean... you need 49mill per person for a large, and 19mill each for med? You cant easily distribute that much gil to people you trust. I was hesitant to even let the officers have 20 mill because they can just not bet the lotto and leave with the gil. Its not a bannable offense.

You know there's this thing called alts, right? It's literally pay to win.

[PharisHanasaki]

what was your point then? from where I'm standing it makes more sense for a large house to go to an fc with 100 members instead of 4 members.

You really can't see the broad picture, right?
It can be an FC of 8 alts, each buying a single ticket for one plot, thus increasing their chances of hoarding that one plot. If they bought one ticket, and won, fine. But being able to buy multiple for a single plot it's stupid if the idea is to give people a fair chance.

Plus, I've seen FCs with over 50 members, but 2 active. So, meh.

Either way, if you're happy with how it is right now, then it's fine by me. Go fight for your plots.

[Aeika]

You know there's this thing called alts, right? It's literally pay to win.

Having alts doesnt make it easy to make 19-49 million gil, unless youre literally paying.... and they ban RMT accounts near weekly

[TaleraRistain]

'Don't over-promise.'

I don't think this would be as big an issue -- except it's only a guess that people who took refunds will still have their name associated with the house in question.

We assume proper, accessible, and usable auditing logs for all of this. But they're just assumptions. I lean in the direction that Square is being cautious when approaching this topic, taking the time to look into what data they have, what systems are in place to handle the problem and the resolution, and only telling us what they're 100% certain of. Right now, what they're 100% certain of is that they're going to investigate the issue and address it in some way. All things being equal, while this issue shouldn't have happened in the first place, it did. And I can't blame Square for taking a cautious approach to replying to any issue involving housing, the third rail topic of the entire game.

Yeah. A *good* team is going to be honest about the situation and what they know. A *bad* team is going to flat out lie. I've worked with other management who were the bad team type before. They would outright lie to users and then users were even more angry later on when those promises never came to pass because that team could never make good on it. I take a lot of heat from users just saying "We don't know yet" so people are always going to be demanding, but they trust what I say a lot more.

[Naridar]

So with my (admittedly limited) programming knowledge, I think this is what likely happened:

1. At the predetermined time, RNG picks exactly one of the character IDs from the "entered the lottery" array. The array is not a fixed size and can even be empty.
2. In order to prevent a possible server crash, the game adds a fixed "0" to the array so that it would never be empty.
3. The game was supposed to remove the "0" as soon as a character with a non-"0" ID entered the lottery.

And judging from the end result, I'd wager step 3 was left wanting.

For next time, a word of advice from 10th grade programming: check if the "participants" array is empty right before RNGing, and add a "0" only if it is. This is not 10th grade programming, it's a subscription-based MMORPG with 30+ million active subscribers.

[PharisHanasaki]

Having alts doesnt make it easy to make 19-49 million gil, unless youre literally paying.... and they ban RMT accounts near weekly

I think you probably spend more time in the forums than actually playing if you think like this. Fine. Go fight for your plot, as I said.

[Lunalepsy]

Really? Your entire FC can bid on a housing plot.... and NO ONE can win still? You can be the ONLY person to bid, and STILL lose??? This is ridiculous, it was hard enough to get a house plot already when it was guaranteed!

Ouch, that's painful. I took my money back ASAP!