Housing Lottery Needs some adjustments

[PaalHenrik]

No one can game the lottery in their favour. It's a 5 day period in which to bid up until the drawing. What's next? Asking for a further 24 hours after the 4 day claim to get your win? An extra month to claim your gil if you lost?

[DrWho2010]

"what you've noticed" has no bearing on a system based on RNG. Might want to look up a little something called "gambler's fallacy".

[Sindele]

Yep. Humans are really good at inferring patterns from small amounts of data. It's a brilliant evolutionary trait - without it, we'd be somewhere in the woods waving sticks at each other instead of here arguing about whether the big electric thinking rock we all access with our smaller thinking rocks is making up the right kind of random number. But.

That same talent for pattern prediction also makes us very good at inferring patterns from random data that don't necessarily exist. (Apophenia and pareidolia - and the whole cluster of fallacies and biases that arise from them! Particularly relevant here is the "clustering illusion".) Worse, once we feel like we've seen a pattern - no matter how spurious it might be taken in aggregate - we will often passively ignore the data points contradicting it. (This one's the "Texas sharpshooter fallacy".)

It's why the hard data is of such critical importance when you're alleging non-random results from a process that should be random - these are mistakes that even quite well-educated people can and will make if they aren't vigilant against them.

[mauiestlauiest]

I knew just by reading the title a lot of people would meme on this. But I've noticed that lottery ticket #2 seems to be the winner a LOT. When I first lost to bidder two (that did not bid in the last 30 min but did bid after I did), I checked the other placards in the ward and there was a shockingly high number of #2 winners. This is anecdotal. But after I lost to the second bidder not just a second time, but a THIRD time, it's a hard to not question if SE actually fixed their issue. Of course, I am not claiming and would never claim that #2 has a higher chance or that you have a higher chance if you bid last BUT there are quite a few people giving testimonies of "someone bid last minute on the FC house where we had 17 other bids and they won" "I lost a 2/2 when someone came and bid after me". Not just on this forum but multiple discords.

People seem to be forgetting the "RNG" that was the broken lottery system when it first released. You know, remember? The 0 winner error? Based on this history, we know Square Enix is not perfect, we all know this, so of course it's possible their RNG system could have another issue. And I should add that it's entirely possible their "RNG" is not "R" to begin with. I implore you to read this: https://slate.com/technology/2022/06...andomness.html or DYOR into programming randomness on computers, etc.

Over the past few months, when there were maybe 3 or 4 homes for bidding during any given lottery period, we didn't have a large amount of data to prove their RNG is ineffective (not saying it IS just saying we didn't have the data to prove it or otherwise). Most of those homes had like 150-200 bidders and maybe the RNG acts differently with different max thresholds. It's quite possible that this new wave of empty plots has shown us new data on SE's random "ball" selector as they call it. There is a lot of research on RNG in terms of both lottery and gaming. Highly recommend looking into it. This might not be as asinine of an idea as people are making it out to be.

And remember folks, SE is a company. Companies need profit. Unless there is a glaringly obvious issue, I highly doubt they would openly admit "Yeah we messed up the lottery system *again*" for another ding on their already-busted housing system. Just my 2 gil.

[mauiestlauiest]

As I've specified... It's what "I've noticed" on my own server running around and checking placards since the Lottery's implementation last year. I've checked Ishgard Large housing when implemented, the L houses that opened as a result of movers, the occasional L plot that would open prior to the new wards added in 6.3, Wards 25 through 30 L plots in all zones, and the L's that became available as a result of those who were able to relocate thereafter.

Not trying to phrase it as an accusation, just one player's observation of his home world lottery system. If players invested in the housing lottery have notice a similar pattern on their servers and DC's, hopefully they share, and that this can turn into something worth reviewing by SE.

Just something I've noticed. Players are, for whatever reason, super touchy when you criticize or bring up any sort of opinion regarding housing, lottery, or anything close. For the most part, they have gotten their mansions and 8 alt houses or whatever so criticizing the system in which they've "won" means you're "criticizing them". Just ignore when people do this crap. It's almost like if you aren't presenting any hard facts, you can't present opinions, anecdotes or personal findings either? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Sindele]

This may be so, but as the saying goes, "the plural of anecdote is not data" - people are, as a rule, more inclined to complain and rationalize when things don't go their way. How often do winners talk about the exact number and circumstances of their ticket? Is there an equal wellspring of them to draw from?

Consider, meanwhile: 2 rightly should be the second most common winning ticket number - and tied for most common if you exclude all single-bid lotteries. This is a natural consequence of tickets being serially issued - any contest with two or more bids will always have a ticket #2, and no small quantity of them will stop at 2.

Consider also: The odds of an 18-entry lottery resulting in ticket 18 winning is still roughly 5.5%. That's pretty high chances. And if they're blurring those "last minute bids always win" claims to also include ticket 16 or 17 as 'the last minute bidders beat us', well, those odds start multiplying fast. Even 5% is something that will happen in a high amount of lotteries when you're applying it to several hundred instances of those odds.

It certainly could be the case that it's broken, of course - it's impossible to rule that out without code in hand - but there's a lot of work to be done to prove that doubt reasonable.

E: People also seem to get very touchy when you suggest that extraordinary claims need to be substantiated with a little more evidence than 'I feel like it'.

[mauiestlauiest]

E: People also seem to get very touchy when you suggest that extraordinary claims need to be substantiated with a little more evidence than 'I feel like it'.

You coulda @'d me d; but anyways... this is true. But only because they've noticed something that other people are putting down immediately without consideration. That's when people get touchy. The number of times people have just covered their ears and said "LALALAAA IT'S RNG IT'S A COINFLIP, SHUT UP" is just baffling. Many people understand that it's RNG but repeated losing to the same number tends to cause touchiness and not only touchiness but also looking outward for other people that have experienced similar things. On the other hand, I don't understand people getting upset when other people want to talk about their experiences, I mean outright flaming someone for merely mentioning a pattern they've noticed. Not a good look.

It certainly could be the case that it's broken, of course

and this is really what most people are okay to accept. Not straight up "That's untrue! you're an idiot." but "Yeah, it's possible for sure but unlikely considering XYZ" -- which, appreciate you being nice about it.

---

But my point today was to not talk about winners or losers. I specifically just wanted to remind people that A. randomness is not going to be perfect on computers. B. SE showed us this before with their initial lottery screw up. C. They would likely not admit again that they screwed up unless it was 100% obvious. D. Don't let anyone ever make you feel bad for your anecdotes.

[Sindele]

Part and parcel of a largely unmoderated and ignored forum where the most common type of poster is the 'drive-by complainer', I'm afraid. People get hardened to it when they hear the same complaint a thousand times made by people who don't want to hear anything other than 'yes, of course, you're right, here's your new house', and that tends to make them increasingly hostile to that type of complaint. (And that's not counting the people who are just here to start problems with literally everyone from the drop..)

Hard to stay above it when nobody's paying you to. I try to be understanding until the stubbornness kicks in, but, well, I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't starting off a little hardened by it too.

E:

C. They would likely not admit again that they screwed up unless it was 100% obvious.

Thing is, if we're talking historical precedent as a justifier, this one doesn't seem quite as credible. As a one-off example, I submit the Ungarmax post-mortem. This is a nearly unprecedented level of insight into the process of identifying and repairing an exploit that was used by a tiny, tiny fraction of people, and affected very little in the end prior to its rapidly implemented fix. You could argue that it having gone public constitutes "100% obvious".. but I think if this were an issue actively affecting people, and it became known to them, I don't see them silently brushing it under the rug without acknowledgement. It doesn't track with how they've done things in the past. This is an MMO of spectacularly unusual transparency, and one that I think has earned the assumption of good faith in this respect.

[Elevin]

Modern PRNGs are extremely, extremely fast - the execution time for each roll would be measured in nanoseconds. There would be no reason to roll ahead of time.

What's your sample size? "More often than not" is a statement that needs some serious qualification given the accusation.

Doubt. Think of the fact that the servers could go offline at any moment. What if they're down when the entry period switches to results? Is that extra calculations that the devs have factored in when starting up the server? I'd think the safest bet would be to draw every time a ticket is entered on the property, that way the server doesn't have any issues due to server maintenance or other factors.

[DrWho2010]

remember the initial bug of the housing lottery system wasn't a problem with RNG it was a problem with incorrect data and miscommunication between servers.