Housing update 3 is up.

[Manofpassion]

I don't think miashino is wrong. I'm not American, but I don't know a single american who thinks their telecoms provider is good, and a casual glance on the Internet shows us telecoms in the United States is viewed unfavorably. I don't think anyone is surprised US telecoms does something to piss of their customers. Part and parcel of the United States experience.

I am unsure why we are comparing US telecoms to a Japanese video game studio. Seems like apples and oranges to me. But I would hope we can hold square to a higher standard than to the infamously frustrating US telecoms industry. If square ends up putting me on hold for 40 minutes to get my house like what happens to me when I have to reconnect my Internet since my service provider provider fucked up again, I will be very unamused.

[Livilda]

So the lottery was still BS as even the numbers that won and a real person did not get Zero the fact that the number Zero was a Factor in the lottery means the winning person won well competing with the number Zero so if there was no number Zero in the drawing another person could have won.

Bottom line those who won the house are not real winners and they should be stripped of their house and a redo must occur.




The person didn't beat you or really win. The lottery was bugged and they should loss the house. Bottom line the lottery used the number 0 in the draw which meant even the houses who went to a person that draw also used the number 0 to factor it in. So if the number 0 was not in the drawing someone else might have won.

If I throw in the numbers 0 through 10 in a drawing there is a chance 0 will be chosen, but it will affect it will lower the chances for the other numbers to be chosen. If we remove the number 0 from a drawing and have the numbers 1 through 10 the chances of the other numbers to be drawn will be different.

Even for those who won the houses it is not legitimate due to the factor of including the number 0 in the draw.

Did you even read the update? There WAS NO NUMBER 0. Each plot which had 5 entrants had 5 entrants. Each plot which had 1 entrant had 1 entrant. The cause was a failure to communicate to the housing server, and 0 is just a placeholder number for that error.

They test stuff but testing does not reveal everything. A patch can work fine in testing but develope a bug the moment it goes live. Or develope a bug when a patch is applied or a server restart happens.

When in doubt, look to the legends of programming:
"Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs." - Edsger Dijkstra
"One can construct convincing proofs of the futility of exhaustive testing." - Tony Hoare

[Livilda]

Yes this what been saying from the very beginning with this and no one wants to acknowledge this at. Even if your plot did not get hit with the zero bug it still play a factor in which number which was draw from what I saw on my server the majority was single digit numbers such as 1,2,3 and 5 the highest I seen was a 8. I fully support a full roll back on all the house so that the proper system is working correctly. But they rather just tell folks that got jip out winning a house better luck next time.

I agree with you in the multiple entries lottery, but I got a zero and was the only entry. You can run it a million times in a row with 1 to 10 and I still won ....but I lost to a zero ...

0 was never an entry number.
It says so in the latest update.
0 is just a placeholder for the error in communication to the housing server.
All lottery data has been retained, and it is all valid and does not contain any "extra entries" other than players' own entries.
They are working on restoring this data.
Meaning, Sagacious, you will get the house for which you were the only entrant.

[MsMisato]

does this mean all the affected player who have claimed their refund needs now to have enough Gil in case they are the winner ?

yea you will need to pay for the home. They simply are saying they can see who was suppose to win and if and when the winner is selected for those affected plots, you are going to claim within the time frame.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I don't think miashino is wrong. I'm not American, but I don't know a single american who thinks their telecoms provider is good, and a casual glance on the Internet shows us telecoms in the United States is viewed unfavorably. I don't think anyone is surprised US telecoms does something to piss of their customers. Part and parcel of the United States experience.

I am unsure why we are comparing US telecoms to a Japanese video game studio. Seems like apples and oranges to me. But I would hope we can hold square to a higher standard than to the infamously frustrating US telecoms industry. If square ends up putting me on hold for 40 minutes to get my house like what happens to me when I have to reconnect my Internet since my service provider provider fucked up again, I will be very unamused.

See, here's the thing. That's not customer facing links, that's internal, and doesn't actually bring the network down cuz redundancies.

It was a point to show that qa doesn't catch everything, and say what you want about NA telecoms, but I'm the one playing with the newest technology at work lol. They do tend to be on the cutting edge of network tech, even if they aren't very consumer oriented.

[Krotoan]

Forgive this lala for pressing X to doubt the extensive Q&A done by US telecoms. Can hardly tie a set of Velcro shoes let alone deliver a stable service. Am hardly surprised a frequent failure to establish connection for certification bug slipped through that could likely have been handled by if failed to certify attempt again > reset > attempt again.

No. I will not forgive ignorance feeding into a superiority complex from someone who compares last mile service for individual customers troubles to testing to determine stability or validity of a potential upgrade or addition to a service providing software server-side.

Am happy this is being addressed if that makes everyone else happy to hear. I can tell the friends who were thinking of quitting over this that they will receive their FC houses.

Perhaps in future times Square can perform most complicated tests such as;
"What if server A fails to communicate with server B?"

and

"What if account/character is falsely flagged as unable to purchase?" Can they still place a bet?"

Please continue to show ignorance about how testing can only pick so many variables to test and certain situations simply aren't replicatable in a timely manner for testing.

Nah! Am only armchair coder with expectations most lofty who has not a clue what they are talking about.

You seem to be joking.. but your post is very much showing this over and over. Anyone who does this stuff for a living is either facepalming reading your response or laughing at you.

Thankfully this is not EA/Activision or we would be justified in frustration! May have to express that feist if it were not Square and the FFXIV dev team. Phew thank the twelve it is the FFXIV dev team, I can go back to being complacent now.

Carry on everyone! Is fix!

It seems you'd rather continue to try and say there was justification in being excessively mad for a problem that likely wasn't possible to test in a timely manner than acknowledge that this was a big problem that they then apologized for and are in the process of fixing fairly and expediently.

[NanaWiloh]

See, here's the thing. That's not customer facing links, that's internal, and doesn't actually bring the network down cuz redundancies.

It was a point to show that qa doesn't catch everything, and say what you want about NA telecoms, but I'm the one playing with the newest technology at work lol. They do tend to be on the cutting edge of network tech, even if they aren't very consumer oriented.

Out of curiousity hows that going??

[Moonlite]

Give GMs more power. Give them the list and get to handing out to the right winners. Fixing the problem may take awhile, nothing is instant. But GMs are so useless in this game they are just there to make no ones feelings get hurt. There are so few houses in this game they could have a GM division for housing, we wouldn't have full wards with single owners and wouldn't have had so much flipping.




Also late grats to people who will be joining the limited housing community.

[Shibi]

yea you will need to pay for the home. They simply are saying they can see who was suppose to win and if and when the winner is selected for those affected plots, you are going to claim within the time frame.

Yes, they will work out a way to deal with the withdrawals.

But I will add, for those who withdrew and then went off and spent the gil; they really need to work at earning it back over the next 3 to 5 days. And also please don't forget that you also need extra on top to buy the build-permit for the house. The lottery is just the empty plot.

[Manofpassion]

It seems you'd rather continue to try and say there was justification in being excessively mad for a problem that likely wasn't possible to test in a timely manner than acknowledge that this was a big problem that they then apologized for and are in the process of fixing fairly and expediently.

Honestly, if they can't test it in a timely manner, I rather they just delay it to 6.2. Or a slow rolling out as previously suggested. While these two methods will inevitably still create frustration and draw criticism, I can tell you with 100% certainty it wouldn't have drawn as much criticism than this. Another alternative option was to introduce lottery earlier, before ishgard housing is put in the game, and see if it works in earlier wards. That would be good testing on a smaller sample size that wouldn't have created as much grief.

I believe we have shown that we are able to deal with delays. We were able to handle ew being delayed, as disappointing that was. When there has been around a half a decade wait for new housing, and they shit the bed, people are gonna be mad.

At the end of the day, this is the lottery system's first impression on the playerbase, and they messed up big time. First impressions are everything. It's possible to recover from bad first impressions, like 1.0. But are the housing team gonna learn from this and try to making housing less frustrating to make up for this mistake. I doubt it. To me, an apology and a fix will not suffice. I want to see actual improvements to make up for it. Perhaps I am too idealistic.