Housing Lottery Issue

[Vyrie]

They should do a ward cleanup. In Ultros there's 1 FC that has like 5 houses in Mist ward 1, just off the top of my head.

[Canadane]

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...49#post5903449





About the problem that occurs in the lottery sale of the housing (4/17)

Currently, in the lottery sale of housings, when checking the signboard after the result announcement period, the following message is displayed and there are multiple reports that there are no winners.
・ Even though there were applicants, "There were no lottery participants." Is displayed.
・ "The winning number is 0. You have lost." Is displayed, and it is displayed as if there are no winners.
We are urgently checking the applications on the database and proceeding with the investigation and response. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused to our customers.

[Hawkeye_Certor]

My FC were also affected by these, but we withdrew the refund. Will be absolutely fuming if this means we wont get the house after this is investigated. We were the only people in the lottery as well, so it's pretty disappointing. Hopefully this can be resolved quickly, we were really looking forward to decorating our new house.

[Vixsyn]

Same here as well, I was the only one to make a purchase for a FC house and the only participant and number 0 won??? How does that work? Shouldn't the one person win the lottery if there were no other participants? Will be really upset if SE doesn't fix the problem. I did take the refund, so hopefully if the issue is fixed I can still get the house. So upsetting when you've been waiting years to purchase a FC house and this happens, lol.
https://postimg.cc/bZr6ZhsC
https://postimg.cc/xXBPqbr8
https://postimg.cc/9z1tZk3v

[Vyrie]

Just 1 example house had 14 bidders, yet when i clicked the results of the lottery button "There were no participants" and i just went around almost all the plot 60 wards on Ultros, all the ones that I saw were won by lottery #1. Correct me if i'm wrong but this seems fishy

[CappyTan]

Sole bidder and rolled a 0 to no one.. I would hate to reroll on the same plot of land I should have won in the first place.
Now I am staring at an empty plot hoping I can still obtain it before the bots from Zuvan do.

[Tabmow]

The only message i get at the placard is,the winning number was 2. i didnt get aa collect deposit tab, am i out 3.5 million gil now?

[SnakeWeasel]

I understand that the lottery system was implemented to fix the well known problems with the previous housing sales and to be fair it did that. The issue is that the lottery system was obviously not tested will enough. Like many of you posting here, our FC had the only bids on a housing plot and there were no winners on that plot. The tough part of all this was walking away and seeing housing going up on other plots in the ward. It sucks to come this close and lose out to poor; coding, quality control and follow up.

Not going to RAGE quit or demand things I know we wont get. I'm just adding another "How disappointing" comment to the long list of the same.

[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.

[Shibi]

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.

I'd rather they just query the database for a list of houses where 0 won, then for each one remove people who took out the money, and re-roll with the remaining names, awarding the plot.

After sitting on mine for 5 days, stressed each time someone ran past, I don't want to go through it again, but this time lose.