Housing Lottery Needs some adjustments

[Elevin]

Fair post, and there is currently no one gathering the data for the winning numbers. A certain 3rd party website that provides crowd sourced data if configured could probably which would be incredibly useful not that there are currently any that already exist :3.

Personally, I won a small plot with just over 100 tickets on and i was one of the last tickets on. I also JUST lost a plot by 1 with like 247 tickets on and i think 243 won or something and i was 242. All the plots i've bid on, it has always been the last bidder that won or near enough the last. Again this is anecdotal evidence and a tiny sample size.

I do suspect that there may be issues. We can only suspect without masses of evidence, but as you say, we ended up with 0 as a winner back in April was it that they spent like 2 months fixing or something.

[Sindele]

Disclaimer: I've never worked on an MMO personally, I just hang around people who have and know enough bits and pieces outside my own discipline to get myself into trouble. So, to my knowledge: if it's built by people who aren't criminally insane, they're both done as part of one job, and that job completing successfully would be a necessary prerequisite for the job that moves the lottery into the results period. If the servers go down ahead of that and the downtime lasts past results time, it's not a big deal; the job just goes into the queue of things that need to be completed as part of 'catching up' to the current time. If the server goes down in the middle of the job, well, 1) you have bigger problems, but 2) ideally you shouldn't be making any database changes until all is said and done, so you can just discard the failed run and start over.

Of course, we know what happened before when things weren't going perfectly, and results weren't being fully communicated: you'd get a zero result. The process of fixing that almost certainly entailed adding additional validation that would further protect against bad/malformed results going live, and that would also be easier to do as part of one bulk job rather than scraping all the thousands of pre-cast results out of the database or running that validation thousands of extra times for no material gain.

[mauiestlauiest]

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.

Hard to stay above it when nobody's paying you to.

I thought about this for a while, just wanted to come back and say, and not specifically to you but to anyone reading this: Right, that's the key. Nobody is paying to anyone to respond to complaints. You literally DON'T have to do it!

People get hardened to it when they hear the same complaint a thousand times

Then this sounds like something that needs to be addressed if it's a complaint that's being mentioned "a thousand times", no? This is a forum where users can give feedback. This is what companies need, they don't need some random schmoe in Wyoming defending their honor. So it's baffling when people do so with hostility when they could very well just, y'know, not reply with a prickish response. It's not a requirement of using the forum, you can literally just not reply to complaints you are tired of seeing.

[Themarvin]

It's the second lottery after the addition of new wards, and the second time my FC lost out to a person who placed a bid within the last 30mins of the deadline.

So how does this RNG actually work? I wouldn't feel so salty about losing to the final bidder if there was a bigger gap between the bidding deadline and the winner announcement.

In my honest opinion, if a player throws in a bid within the last 12 to 24 hours of calling the winners, then the probability that their number gets called should be drastically diminished.

I don't see your point.... why do you and your friends not wait untill the last minutes to see which plots got the most bids on to increase the chance? Why should that person be punished for trying to have let us say a 10% chance instead of a 1% chance?

The lottery system works and being mad on people being randomly selected with SE rolling a dice with the number of people that is at that plot... if the person put in the vote before you guys did... short time after or 1 second before the house lottery is over is entirely irrelevant and also no one should have a higher chance of winning a plot as you suggest, then you are to point one.

Try again and also if you feel like you spend less time, then you as well can place a bid at a housing plot that has a few bids on it to increase the rng to be a a selection of 3 people getting a house instead of 300.

[dspguy]

No, but it is their job to observe and receive feedback on their systems, which is what I'm giving on the lottery system. If the housing lottery gave you a randomized number on your ticket, versus a number based on the order you placed your bid then I could agree with your cactpot comparison. I'd hate winning ticket 4362 less than jerk face bidder number 23

I understand your frustration, but your experience is anecdotal at best. They'd need to survey thousands of players to see if your particular claim is valid. To be honest, they don't need to survey players at all. I'm sure they can see what RNG is putting out and see if the results fall within a standard deviation.

In my experience (anecdotal!), the RNG is just fine. Sometimes it works in your favor, sometimes it doesn't.

Years ago, I tracked every meld I did for two expansions - and I used to pentameld both DoW/M gear and DoH/L gear. I tracked the odds (17%, 12% 10% 5%, etc). There were times when a 17% meld failed 20 times. And of course there were times the 5% meld failed 100 times. However, there were also plenty of times the 5% succeeded on the first try. Over thousand of meld chances, the RNG seemed pretty spot on.

In a lottery, there will commonly be N-1 losers. More often than not, any given player will be a loser.

[Ayan_Calvesse]

Fair post, and there is currently no one gathering the data for the winning numbers. A certain 3rd party website that provides crowd sourced data if configured could probably which would be incredibly useful not that there are currently any that already exist :3.

Personally, I won a small plot with just over 100 tickets on and i was one of the last tickets on. I also JUST lost a plot by 1 with like 247 tickets on and i think 243 won or something and i was 242. All the plots i've bid on, it has always been the last bidder that won or near enough the last. Again this is anecdotal evidence and a tiny sample size.

I do suspect that there may be issues. We can only suspect without masses of evidence, but as you say, we ended up with 0 as a winner back in April was it that they spent like 2 months fixing or something.

Honestly we would need more accurate data - thought it would explain the folks claiming they lost to 2's very often. Mind you I've lost to #1 before.

[Pablomaldito]

RNG gonna RNG. In the first round I shotgunned 12 bids across a few servers on Crystal. There's no pattern. I've won as #1, lost as #1, and lost to #1.

Balmung:
Main Character personal house bid for medium in Goblet. Was bidder #1. At least 2 more bidders joined in. I won.

Alt backup personal house bid for a small with not so great location. Only bidder going into last day. #2 joined in near the end and beat me.

FC bid for medium in Mist. Had 4 bids in. Thought I had it secured because the surrounding mediums had only 3 bids on them. #5 swooped in on the last day and beat me.

Zalera:
2 personal bids for a small house in Shirogane. #3 came in on the last day and beat me.

3 FC bids for small poolside in Goblet. It already had 1 bid when I came in. #1 ended up beating my 3 bids

Goblin:
Personal bid for a small in Empyreum. Uncontested.

RNG was indeed random. My luck was pretty bad in terms of raw numbers, but I won my most coveted (and least likely) bid for a personal medium on Balmung on my actual main character.

[Jojoya]

I do suspect that there may be issues. We can only suspect without masses of evidence, but as you say, we ended up with 0 as a winner back in April was it that they spent like 2 months fixing or something.

There never was a ticket #0 as a winner. We got the in depth explanation of what happened. The winner information didn't correctly transfer from the lottery server to the housing servers and so the system displayed 0 as a default.

Just as you have your anecdotal evidence that it's always a late bidder to wins, I have my anecdotal evidence that it's the early bidder who wins. It's random. It's easy to get suspicious when you're never the winner but that doesn't mean there's something wrong with how the lottery functions.

The "wrong" is in how the housing system was designed so there are never enough of the plots players want to own, leading many to end up bidding on the same plot whether they are a current owner trying to get a better plot, or someone trying to get their first house. Even if there were enough plots for every player to have a house, there would still be players fighting over the more desirable plots and some complaining about how they never win.

[TAS]

There never was a ticket #0 as a winner. We got the in depth explanation of what happened. The winner information didn't correctly transfer from the lottery server to the housing servers and so the system displayed 0 as a default.

Just as you have your anecdotal evidence that it's always a late bidder to wins, I have my anecdotal evidence that it's the early bidder who wins. It's random. It's easy to get suspicious when you're never the winner but that doesn't mean there's something wrong with how the lottery functions.

The "wrong" is in how the housing system was designed so there are never enough of the plots players want to own, leading many to end up bidding on the same plot whether they are a current owner trying to get a better plot, or someone trying to get their first house. Even if there were enough plots for every player to have a house, there would still be players fighting over the more desirable plots and some complaining about how they never win.

The "0 bid winner" example was meant to show that, upon implementation, the lottery system had a critical flaw. Yeah, the servers on their end showed an actual winner, but until it was reflected on our housing servers, the players who had the winning numbers had zero confirmation and zero access.

Thankfully that issue got resolve, but that doesn't mean players, whether they win or not, should be dumped on if they question or speculate that something else could potentially be bugged in the system. After that fix, we never got a (We've continued to observe our lottery system and after tracking the last several cycles, we can confirm everything is working as intended) We just assumed because, so long as someone puts in a bid and winner is able to claim, who cares?

Yes, players who say they've noticed a pattern in lottery winners is purely anecdotal. But, in that regard, so are players who say the RNG system is working as intended. Only a FFXIV DEV can definitively answer that question.

[Jojoya]

Yes, players who say they've noticed a pattern in lottery winners is purely anecdotal. But, in that regard, so are players who say the RNG system is working as intended. Only a FFXIV DEV can definitively answer that question.

And I'm certain they've kept an eye on it since that original critical flaw.

People spend way too much time worrying about things that more often than not are working as intended simply because they need to feel victimized since they aren't getting what they want.

How many times does it need to be repeated: the lottery is not the problem, the limiting ward system is. SE could remove the lottery and implement some other new purchase system but we'll continue to have the same problems when there are not enough houses for every player and FC.