House Auto Demo'd when I've entered Recently

[Jojoya]

I also don't like to endorse hearsay and misinformation, so there's also that.

Yet I'm not offering hearsay. It's not "a friend told me a friend of a friend had this happen".

These were situations I was personally involved in as a tenant. I was the one letting my friends know that the pending demolition notifications were still active. I watched one enter his house and still had the pending demo notification until he interacted with his Mender. I know the time frame between when the other friend had last entered their house and when the notification popped up on my alt.

If I was called as a witness in a court of law, would my testimony be dismissed as hearsay? No, it wouldn't because I would be recounting my personal experience.

Also, what actual misinformation is being posted? No one is denying that entering a house should reset the demo timer. We're saying that there appears to be a bug so that the entry that should reset the timer doesn't always get registered properly. Does the bug happen as the player enters? Probably, that seemed to be the case with my first friend. Does the bug maybe happen because SE has to rollback data on the housing server for some reason and the backup used occurred before the owner entered their house but the rollback occurred a short time after? That's always a possibility.

The real misinformation would be to state that entering a house you own will reset the demo timer 100% guaranteed. Because I can personally attest that is not the case. I had also been a skeptic about the bug being real back before I saw it happen to the first friend. I most definitely am a skeptic no longer.

This isn't a court of law. We're not accusing anyone of a criminal act. We are pointing out that something is going wrong far too often to too many different players in a system intended to mitigate a problem that SE created with their poor content design in the first place, and that it is harming the game experience of those players who are impacted by it.

My friends got lucky. They had me for a tenant and I'm checking my Estate timer regularly because I run the workshops for the FCs we're in. I was able to let them know there was a problem and confirm it was corrected.

Not every player has a tenant. Not everything thinks to check the Estate timers because unless you're running a workshop or trying to buy/relocate a house there is zero need to.

Maybe one of these days, someone paranoid about possibly losing their house because they don't enter it often will start taking screenshots and get hit by the bug. Then there will be some evidence to satisfy you.

It's still asinine to demand evidence when the evidence could only be obtained by either being psychic and knowing in advance it was going to happen, or by traveling to the past.

Nope. It's harder to show with screenshots than video but it's theoretically doable. It would require the date, nameplate of the character, proof of being inside the house, proof of being the owner and the timer showing (if it's not been refreshed).

On PC, the screenshot file name is the date and time that the screenshot is taken. I vaguely remember reading that FFXIV has a hidden watermark system similar to WoW's that repeats the information though I could be wrong on that.

The problem of proving that the house shown in the screenshot is their house is more problematic. If the player catches it before the house demo's, that's easier since the furnishings and placement should still match. If it's after demolition, SE might take it seriously if the furnishings in the screenshot are included in the furnishings transferred to the Resident Caretaker. Or they might not.

But still, the player has to know or at least suspect in advance that there's going to be a problem and that a screenshot may be needed. The only ones likely to think about it are those who are already keeping track of when they last entered to make sure a house they aren't using doesn't get demolished. Normal players will probably never have the thought enter their minds.