Housing Lottery Issue

[Sonara]

Mainly a rant just so this isn't bouncing in my head. Not sure if it should be a new thread. XP

This has potential to be a really nasty issue depending on the nature of it.
When I turned up and saw winner was zero my brain first thought "Oh okay, arrays are zero indexed so must mean applicant 1, shame"
But then heard of these issues and people losing when they were the only bidder.

Obviously I don't know all the checks in the FF system for housing or how anything's stored, but here's my rough guess.

I assume that the lottery tickets are stored in a DB looking something like [Server, Ward, HouseId, TicketId, PlayerId]
With, lets say 5 people applied for a house the ticket Id's would be 1-5.

So the obvious issue is most RNG's if you use their base methods to get a number up to a value, will include zero if you don't tell them otherwise.
HOWEVER, this is where it could get super nasty. A fair few basic RNG's will not include the provided number in the result range.
So if I did 'Rng.of(5)' then a lot of RNG's would give a number between 0 and 4.
Meaning the last participant in the lottery (in single participant houses first is also last) could NEVER win.

If that's the case, then all results are essentially invalid, and the 'proper' but painful thing to do would be demolish all new ones, refund the owners and just go again fully.
But that will have the people who won with the invalid lottery screaming in rage.

If the RNG has been set to include the maximum then it's not as bad. (But still bad).
Means that for out 5 participants we have the options of it rolling between 0 and 5.
So a 1 in 6 chance it fails.

IF this is the case. Then all successful claims are technically fair.


BUT!
The in both scenarios, the issue is how they handle the ones that failed on zero.
Because if they just fix it and re-open them, then it's very very poor.
I and 4 others randoms on the server were entered into the lottery for a small house, and it rolled zero.
One of us 5 should have gotten that house.
Letting the successful rolls remain, but forcing re-rolls with no restrictions on the failed ones is in my mind unacceptable.
As EVERYONE who didn't win their previous rolls will swarm to the remaining.
So our 1 in 5 chance, now become 1 in 20,000 or something to that effect.
With one of the original 5 likely not winning the house.

A potential solution to this.
Would be to send everyone who bid on that house some form of 'token', valid for the house and ward they bid on.
And in the next cycle, make it so only people who have tokens for the house can spend the gill to buy tickets, consuming the token when doing so.
It's a bit of a pain to do but should be feasible even if it takes a while.
And I feel the fans would much prefer this, even if it's gonna take some time, over a wild west re-try of their house with all those who lost the plot they wanted in the first cycle.