PSA/ALERT: Houses are getting demolished when they shouldn't. SE needs to see this!

[MomomiMomi]

Definitely not standard to not get an e-mail from where I'm standing. I let my house demolition teeter on the edge of being demolished countless times over the years before I finally let it go. I got an e-mail about it every single time.

[Namimi]

A house can be difficult to obtain in this game, and mine is very dear to me. Whenever I read about this bug, my heart nearly stopped. I logged in right away to check my house and thankfully there was no demolition timer.

Though this bug seems to be very rare, I think it would be best to temporarily disable the demolition timer while the developers work to fix it.

My heart also goes out to everyone who lost their home. I would be devastated if I were in the same position; I hope due compensation is given to these players.

[Gemina]

The anxiety I was having at work after reading about this was crazy. I didn't do any of my normal things when getting home and logged on immediately. I would have been utterly devastated if my house had been demolished, and there really is no amount of compensation SE could give me to make up for the time I have invested in my house. Stopping in once a day is a massive understatement, I literally spend most of my time online at my house, and log in everyday! Ugh... just the thought is so disheartening

If this is a true bug, SE must acknowledge and address it. Hackers can do some nasty things, and this would strike right at the heart of this game. So many subs would drop.

[Cylla]

The anxiety I was having at work after reading about this was crazy. I didn't do any of my normal things when getting home and logged on immediately. I would have been utterly devastated if my house had been demolished, and there really is no amount of compensation SE could give me to make up for the time I have invested in my house. Stopping in once a day is a massive understatement, I literally spend most of my time online at my house, and log in everyday! Ugh... just the thought is so disheartening

If this is a true bug, SE must acknowledge and address it. Hackers can do some nasty things, and this would strike right at the heart of this game. So many subs would drop.

You and me both. I spend a lot of my time in my house and FC house and I'm online everyday even if just for a few hours.
I'd be heart broken if I lost my houses. Me and a friend spent forever fighting on Balmung to get the plots we really wanted and when we knew it was slim, we moved servers. Still the plots we wanted weren't open when we moved to Goblin, but after about a month-month and half I was just randomly checking around for the fun of it over in Shiro and in my mind told myself, "The plot not going to be open." Flipped through the first few wards and then did a double take. The plot we wanted was open. I booked it to the sign quickly and moved our small FC house to the plot. Then about three weeks after, the large that I wanted (2nd pick) came open in LB and I was just down right excited and happy.
To lose them both, yeah, nothing SE gave me would make up for it unless they gave me the plot(s) back. I'd unsub and never look back again nor would I feel the need to support SE as a company anymore. May seem harsh to some, but when you've put so much time into something only to have it taken away by a company error and not have them fix it, it not cool at all. I've started losing faith in SE a long time ago when housing was released, I now have very little trust in them and their system.

[KisaiTenshi]

If this is a true bug, SE must acknowledge and address it. Hackers can do some nasty things, and this would strike right at the heart of this game. So many subs would drop.

In my opinion, there's at least three "possible" reasons for this:

a) SE paused the auto-demo timer for Japan, which only paused the process running for the servers in those data centers. The actual demolish process might be a MDE, so something like "select housing_plots from housing_wards where owner_last_entered > (variable) days" , send email. Thus the email notification may have stopped or been missed by having the auto-demo timer paused for Japan. Did anyone who had this issue get an email before it happened?

b) SE updated the server software and some of the servers clocks went backwards then forwards, thus the auto-demolish was activated. This would quite literately require a server to lose a at least week if it's to be believed. eg someone set the clock to 2018-10-08 rather than 2018-08-10, thus advancing the auto-demo timer, which is 59 days in this example. So it IS theoretically possible that a date was mis-keyed, but if this was the case, it would have happened to absolutely everyone, and would have been widespread, thus justifying some kind of rollback during maintenance.

c) It's an isolated incident due to grandfathering of the previous housing ownership policy where players could own more than one house. Perhaps resulting in auto-demo not being tracked for all but the housing plot with the lowest index key.

But IMO if this was widespread, SE would have rolled it back.

[Anghri]

Just thought I would add my comment here as not sure what else to do as other avenues have not gotten traction.

I logged in today to see that my house was reclaimed. I have been somewhat inactive in the last 2-3 weeks as work has been hectic. I last visited my personal house about 3 weeks ago while crafting to look at setting up a crafting merchant. As I came online today I noticed that I no longer had the teleport option to visit my personal house and went to investigate. As stated above, I found my house was not longer there and the reclamation merchant had all of my housing items for me to pick up. I submitted a ticket but was given a generic response in-game thanking me for submitting a bug report. I have not heard back from SE or anything on this.

Wanted to post to validate that this is very real and I hope that SE can fix this issue as it was a big accomplishment for me in-game to be able to get my own house and this is a pretty big loss for me. Hope that this does not happen to others.

[Cylla]

Friend and I talked about this earlier today and I thought, "What if it had something to do with the JP auto timer being frozen and it effecting the NA servers?" It possible.
And to answer that question, most everyone who said they lost their house, didn't get an email warning or anything. They just logged in and found their house demo.

[Theodric]

I do wonder how they're going to go about solving this. If a player lost a house through no fault of their own then there's a good chance that someone else has already bought the plot in question. Such a person may have been waiting for months - or even years - to get a house of their own, so it's not going to be as simple as stripping it from them to hand it back to the previous owner.

[Gemina]

You and me both. I spend a lot of my time in my house and FC house and I'm online everyday even if just for a few hours.
I'd be heart broken if I lost my houses. Me and a friend spent forever fighting on Balmung to get the plots we really wanted and when we knew it was slim, we moved servers. Still the plots we wanted weren't open when we moved to Goblin, but after about a month-month and half I was just randomly checking around for the fun of it over in Shiro and in my mind told myself, "The plot not going to be open." Flipped through the first few wards and then did a double take. The plot we wanted was open. I booked it to the sign quickly and moved our small FC house to the plot. Then about three weeks after, the large that I wanted (2nd pick) came open in LB and I was just down right excited and happy.
To lose them both, yeah, nothing SE gave me would make up for it unless they gave me the plot(s) back. I'd unsub and never look back again nor would I feel the need to support SE as a company anymore. May seem harsh to some, but when you've put so much time into something only to have it taken away by a company error and not have them fix it, it not cool at all. I've started losing faith in SE a long time ago when housing was released, I now have very little trust in them and their system.

Things have always been calm on Siren as far as housing goes. I saw the opportunity to get a medium plot in Lavender Beds when 4.0 came out. Even though the craze wasn't as bad here, you still needed a fair bit of luck to secure a large/medium plot in the new wards. Still, I wanted to be fair and give the homeless a chance to own since I already owned a cottage and also had my FC home, and I decided to wait a full month to relocate if a medium was available. Lo and behold, I had no problem purchasing a medium plot in the sub division right next to a MB, summoning bell, and aetheryte. Perfect!

The purchase left me near broke, but I also wanted a different theme to the new home unlike an FC mate of mine who relocated to Kugane and just put up the same décor he had in LB xD. The house was my canvas, and I spent months turning it into what I consider one of my most artistic creations. If I lost it, I would have to reflect greatly on one of my favorite FF titles: Final Fantasy VI. Not too big of a spoiler, but during the second half of the game, a villager comments that no matter how many times the light of judgment destroys their homes, they will rebuild them. They reminded me of ants who mindlessly do same thing ^^

That said, I am here to ask everyone that should the unfortunate happen, don't let the attackers win. Nothing can replace the time invested in your artwork, and hopefully we at least retain the plot to rebuild. If so, perhaps you can create something even more beautiful than the last

[Gemina]

I do wonder how they're going to go about solving this. If a player lost a house through no fault of their own then there's a good chance that someone else has already bought the plot in question. Such a person may have been waiting for months - or even years - to get a house of their own, so it's not going to be as simple as stripping it from them to hand it back to the previous owner.

Are the restrictions still in place where after a plot is relinquished, it undergoes some kind of random timer before it becomes available again? If so, I would advise everyone log in at least once a day. Though it won't guarantee reclaiming your previous plot should it get demo, it will at least increase your chances of doing so. I'm hoping anyway.