You can't even code a simple random number picker correctly.

[Katt_Felista]

"Hey mom, come, come and look at the state of the forum ! Remember what we talked about 3 months ago when they announced the lottery ? Look at them, they still think it's a bug ! HAHAHAHA !"

[Gemina]

Correct me if there is something I am not quite getting.

A suspicious amount of plots all over the Emperyum had 0 bids, leading to the conclusion that a possible coding error would assign the first bidder the number 0.

When the lottery draw was executed, 0 is not one of the possible number that can be drawn, effectively eliminating whoever bid first on the property.

What this also means is that if only one person bid on the property, they too were arsed out and the plot is back up for bidding for the next lottery round

Due to other questionable results such as the highest bidder still winning, which should not happen if there was an integer shift because of zero, we are not quite sure how the lottery was coded, only that it was done so erroneously.


..Am I understanding everything correctly? Just trying to wrap my head around the matter.

[Kaurhz]

Not that I defend the appalling state, because I don't. But man the armchair developers are out in full force with these speculations.

[Rolder50]

Not that I defend the appalling state, because I don't. But man the armchair developers are out in full force with these speculations.

This is the kind of thing that should have been picked up immediately in QA testing, so definitely seems like there was either zero or very little testing.

[Greyhawk]

This is the kind of thing that should have been picked up immediately in QA testing, so definitely seems like there was either zero or very little testing.

Exactly - who is to blame here? The developer who started this mess? The manager who didn't check the work? The QA guy who didn't do enough? Let's not forget the QC guy - was he looking at porn instead? Their managers who aren't doing their own QA/QC? The failure of not checking this on the pre-prod environment by testers? Or, the Director for letting it all pass through?

I pick "All of the above" personally.

[Somnolence]

Not that I defend the appalling state, because I don't. But man the armchair developers are out in full force with these speculations.

Good thing I am not armchair developer then Well I work on financial software so I take these things seriously. Since this is a game then for us as customers to be treated fairly for something as contentious as housing system is well within expectations. After all, the houses are virtual and Square Enix have all the tools needed to satisfy us as customers.

[Erakir]

Honestly it matters little if it wasn't as simple as an off-by-one. Crap happens. If this was their ultimate failsafe, it's an extremely bad failsafe from a client perspective. Sure, the servers didn't crash, that's the good part. The game is up and running. That's step 1.

But your clients need information. The players should have received different information than '0 won, please take your money back.' Any instance of a failure to process or a bad or null value being returned should have been trackable. And the fact that they're showing 0 here means that they are, at the very least, trackable after the fact. Something should have been done with that data to ease the players' minds.

If you don't interface with your clients directly as a programmer it's easy to lose sight of giving them pertinent information. That interfacing is hard to have in big companies. More concerned with keeping the system running, absolutely, but they still need information. If a better error message was displayed people would be less rambunctious and they'd know what their next steps would be, even if it's "Wait, because SE is investigating what happened." People feel they've been screwed - forced now to enter a lottery on a smaller number of houses that will have more people competing for them, and you can't blame them for feeling this way. Clients were presented with a big unknown today, and their time and in-game money is on the line for it.

To me it says the developers of this system didn't ultimately think there was any way they could get to this logic state, so as long as it didn't break the servers, fine fine.
Whoops, instead we have a massive amount in this state and confused/upset players.

And now it's on SE's PR to immediately get information to players as soon as they can figure out what can be done, especially considering some players have already taken their gil back from those bids which further complicates everything.

[Xavier_Firbold]

Not that I defend the appalling state, because I don't. But man the armchair developers are out in full force with these speculations.

It’s not even necessary to be an armchair developer though, you could be a pram developer and make this work effectively.

Look, as someone with very little ability, Here’s the code.

x = (rand() * number of tickets) ;

[SnowVix]

x = (rand() * number of tickets) ;

rand() calls from zero through upper, so this hilariously shows exactly how the problem may have happened in the first place, and isn't in fact any demonstration of how you would fix it.

[Xavier_Firbold]

rand() calls from zero through upper, so this hilariously shows exactly how the problem may have happened in the first place, and isn't in fact any demonstration of how you would fix it.

Okay so just add a +1 on the end of the integer.

Congrats we just bug fixed the entire issue.