House Auto Demo'd when I've entered Recently

[Raven2014]

Peace and love but I feel like you're taking this way too seriously with all of the courtroom comparisons.

Maybe I am, maybe I am not. But isn't it all the same? If you want people to believe, you need to provide proof. Regardless of how and where it happens, a court is simply the crystallization of that concept so it's just a good reference point. I can assure you, even if it's just random passing accusation on the street, if you want to make me believe I would ask for the samething: show me the proof.

At best case it's a mistake on the part of the OP, at worst it's a housing glitch in a video game.

I mean ... it's fairly obvious the conversation had gone beyond that scope. Even in your previous reply it doesn't seem you were talking about this particular case. Both you and other person are trying to insist on an issue that never have a proof, and implying asking for proof doesn't make sense. If disagreeing with that means I'm being too serious, then yeah I guess I'm being too serious ...

And I have no issue with that. I also don't like to endorse hearsay and misinformation, so there's also that.

[ACE135]

Do any screenshots exist of people being in their house with the timer menu open that still says the house gets demolished? I think that would be the first thing I would do when something like that would happen.
But then that screenshot can't show if the person is in the right house and not in someone else's house.

[Reinha]

Do any screenshots exist of people being in their house with the timer menu open that still says the house gets demolished? I think that would be the first thing I would do when something like that would happen.
But then that screenshot can't show if the person is in the right house and not in someone else's house.

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). The date doesn't show anywhere in game (I think) but the support desk window has recent topics with dates on them. Connecting ownership to going inside the house could be done through the chat log by showing the placard outside + /playtime, and then going in and showing /playtime again. The chat log would show that the player is still in the same ward between showing the placard and entering the house. Example: [1] [2]. Truthfully no one is going to have the foresight to take those kinds of complicated screenshots in advance.

Even just a description of the timer menu before a house got demolished would help point to the kind of bug people could be experiencing. The timer still going whilst inside the house would point to the game not recognizing someone has met the conditions to refresh the timer. Or if the timer was not visible in the menu 1-14 days before a house got demolished it would mean the timer is faster for some people. The latter would be worse in my opinion because there would be nothing you could do as a player to prevent it. With the first kind of error you would at least know that you have 15 days to enter the house again and again until it works.

What makes it hard to pin point a potential problem like this is that the people who get hit are not the ones who are regularly checking their timers. They log in, go in their house and log out. There is no data being gathered prior to most auto-demolish incidents. The bug report forum has threads in the "working as intended" and "insufficient information" sections, but no confirmed instances of this bug happening. Collecting data would also be easier if the timer wasn't invisible for the first 30 days...

[Ravenblade1979]

Housing demolition is a stupid thing anyways. If you have a house and a paid subscription, there should be no worries about losing your housing plot.

Auto demolition should only be used for account that have ended their subscription or been banned.

No just no. It's yours as long as you pay your sub. You know the risk otherwise yes. There needs to be no change. People just jot be so attached to virtual property is all. Auto demo is there to recycle the plot back into rotation for others to get a shot at.

Instead we got lots of multi owners or people who only sub to keep a plot and not play. We need more restrictions..especially on the latter. If you only paying to keep a plot but not actively play...then why lol

[Ravenblade1979]

There are bugs in the auto demo. I remember way back logged out inside my house then login the next day to find it gone. SE just gives auto help response back and never helps you get lost houses back. All you can do is hope to win another plot in the lottery.

Oh yeah there are bugs but I think I'm waiting to see who actually owned the plot op was talking about. If it wasn't theirs then the plot would have been gone due to the wife not going in it.

[Khryseis_Astra]

What situation?

We know his wife was involved so there's a 50% chance shes the owner and this is a non issue. We also know from previous bugs and exploits that this community is very good at finding proof of the bugs existence and the source condition of the bugs, yet nobody has found any proof of this one beyond "because I said so". Which is more likely; that there's a bug out there with no proof of its existence or his wife failed to maintain the house?

Just to add more speculation to the discussion, if OP is the same person who also wrote a very similar post to Reddit, he and his wife (still unclear who is the owner) were both inside the house a couple weeks ago. She was showing him some decorations and he said he had screenshots from that, but I never saw any posted. If he really does have screenshots, those could show they were both inside the property within the date range to save it from demoing. But who would think to look at the Timers section and screenshot that, when they didn’t think there was any danger of demo?

What I’m thinking is that he is the owner and the wife is the tenant. She’s probably in it all the time decorating, him maybe not so much. Maybe he hadn’t entered it for long enough for the demo process to begin. But assuming he actually was in there a week before the house was demoed, there’s two options: either his memory is faulty or there’s a bug.

At this point, unfortunately, there’s probably nothing he can do, unless he submits the screenshots he claims to have and SE actually does something before this Saturday when someone else wins the house. I’ve never heard of them reinstating an auto-demo before, but I know that once someone else wins it, there’s zero chance they’ll give it back.

But I’ll second the idea that the info in the Timers menu should be more detailed, if only to help troubleshoot whether or not a bug exists. I’ve heard way too many accounts of weirdness surrounding the timer. I’m in my house multiple times a day, so I’d heartbroken if something like this happened to me and there was no way other than my gposes to prove I was there.

[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.

[dspguy]

I lost my house years ago. It was during the initial purge, if I recall. I was away on business and received an email that I had 5 days left. I got home with 1 day to spare. House was already gone. I posted here or reddit or something screen shots of the email with the auto-demo time while standing at lost plot (now owned by someone else since it was FCFS back then) along with a screenshot of my local PC time which clearly showed it was before the scheduled auto-demo time.

At the time I was upset, but I realized that I wasn't playing the game, so my house should go to another player.

The current auto-demo notice we get explicitly states that auto-demo cannot happen before the stated time. I don't know if the 2015(?) version of that email stated that or not.

I didn't learn my lesson necessarily. I did manage to get another house afterwards (FCFS, no lockout). When I'm somewhat dormant from the game, I do login every 44th day to reopen the house. And I haven't had the problem since. I probably shouldn't wait until the 44th day of course. Given that housing is only via lottery, that's not a gamble I want to take anymore. So, like much of the server population, I'll hold onto my house now even if I'm not playing the game as much.

[Stormfur]

I saw a Reddit post not too long ago that someone wrote that they lost their house because although they spent a lot of time tending their garden, they didn't actually go inside all that much, and as a result, the demolition timer expired. It surprised me that interacting with your garden wouldn't reset it.

[SieyaM]

I understand it can be frustrating to lose something like an estate that you've spent a lot of hours on, but you have to understand why they can't just give everyone that complains about a glitch whatever they want. What is to stop me from saying that I totally completed TOP and my weapon and achievement just disappeared from a glitch.