A test of "Must you interact to stop estate demolition"

[Shibi]

It's been a point of contention on the forums too long.

1. *I HAVE NO WARNING OF THIS IN MY REGISTERED EMAIL*
2. Entering is all that is needed.

Please do see: https://gyazo.com/f1548b42dbc416060cbd72fc19474474

However, as soon as you zone in the door, without touching a single thing:



I do repeat, no email, with 9 days left on his Medium Shirogane.

[LuciferNacht]

I will always believe, if you NEED the email to remind you to step into your house, I don't care if you lose it.

Also, it's important to understand how technology works, ISPs (your internet service provider) use a variety of tools to process and filter incoming email. The spam-blocking measures they use can also result in blocking mail from legit sources so that's why personal accountability is key.

If anyone truly cares about receiving an email from SE because you're just not using your houses you should have already whitelisted "ffxiv-housing@square-enix.com"

A simple rule in gmail for example:

Matches: from: (ffxiv-housing@square-enix.com)
Do this: Never send it to Spam, Mark it as important

[EorzeaWanderer]

I don’t have any evidence either way, but proving that something works once, or even the vast majority of the time, is not sufficient to prove that a bug does not exist in some cases.

[Shibi]

I will always believe, if you NEED the email to remind you to step into your house, I don't care if you lose it.

Personally I put no weight or credence in that argument as since 2014 or whatever it was when the halls started I've entered my houses daily, however, this is something that you have understand people's lives for. What about if your town is currently flooded out, your house is under water, (as a few towns here are at the moment) and you have a few other things on your mind? You might not accept stuff happens, but I do, and I see a critical part of this process is better notification.

Also, it's important to understand how technology works, ISPs (your internet service provider) use a variety of tools to process and filter incoming email. The spam-blocking measures they use can also result in blocking mail from legit sources so that's why personal accountability is key.

Except - as a unix sysadmin I am quite capable of the trivial task of running my own mail server with 5 nines availability. My ISP's don't get involved with my email outside of carrying the packets to my personal servers, in fact the mail daemon's logs show all attempts of connection - pass or fail - and it's very easily greppable, as proof or not of them attempting to connect. Like most of us, I also have no problem getting the emails warning of upcoming payment, every month for 11 years :- the warning my account and extra retainers - 2 email there from SE every month. As well as all the advertising, no problem.

There is no record in my postfix logs of SE attempting to connect to me outside those items. It's trivially checkable, and accurate. SE have not sent the demo warning, it's not spam trapped.
So no, I don't buy this explanation for laypeople, sorry. It wasn't spam-trapped, and I am not blacklisted with spamhaus or others. Nobody does reputation scoring but my own configuration, and I have all low-reputation emails still go into a bucket for manual checking. So, in my professional opinion, there is no possible technical excuse for the email not being recieved.

Occam's razor, and a zgrep of my logs, suggests it was never sent by SE.

I don’t have any evidence either way, but proving that something works once, or even the vast majority of the time, is not sufficient to prove that a bug does not exist in some cases.

That's fair enough!

As I have the capability to explode an personal medium shiro without care, I am planning to keep testing it. If you have ideas on what might trigger an edge case bug, give me ideas to test please. No matter how outlandish will take a few weeks each time to do the cycle, but I have this thread now. All suggestions welcomed.

One thing I would like, is the warning about the house being in demo to be a big log in warning every login until it's safe again. Fanfare with the gold letters is optional.

[Jojoya]

As I have the capability to explode an personal medium shiro without care, I am planning to keep testing it. If you have ideas on what might trigger an edge case bug, give me ideas to test please. No matter how outlandish will take a few weeks each time to do the cycle, but I have this thread now. All suggestions welcomed.

I'm not super tech savvy. This is layman's guesswork.

My line of thinking is that the bug may have to do with how house entrance data is stored/handled on the housing server and/or any other server types involved with housing and/or demolition tracking.

If there is some sort of backup or other temporary process running in the background, could it be that players who are entering their houses at the same time are not having their entrance registered? At the very least, it likely wouldn't be getting included in the backup and the record of that entry would then be lost if SE had to use the backup for some reason before the next time the player entered their house (or if SE used a backup made before the entrance even happened but the player hadn't entered in a few weeks).

I doubt it's the correct explanation (as it wouldn't quite make sense in my first example below) but it's perhaps a thought starting point that would lead to one.

I have two personal experiences as tenant in the houses of friends.

In the first case, the friend had been absent from the game because his real life house had severe roof damage during a storm and his PS4 was destroyed by water damage. He had to wait a few weeks to get an initial settlement from his insurance before he could buy a new one. He had been back in game for a couple of days when a glance at the estate timers on my alt showed his house was still pending demolition. I send him a message reminding him he needs to enter his house to reset the demo timer. He replied it was the first thing he did when he was able to get back online. I said well it's still showing.

He goes into his house. It's still showing pending demolition for both of us. He's WTF. I say interact with one of your NPCs. He interacted with the NPC. The pending demolition drops off Estate timers for both of us. Was it the interaction with the NPC that caused the timer to disappear, or were our timers delayed in updating for a couple of minutes and just happened to coincide with the object interaction? Take your pick.

That had occurred back when I was still a skeptic myself about those complaining they lost their house even though they had been in it. I was no longer a skeptic.

In the second situation, a different friend had been away on a business trip and unable to play. While on the trip, there had been a death in the family. He came home from the business trip then flew back out the next day to be with family. On that day between trips, he logged into game solely to reset the demo timer on his house because he didn't know how long he was going to be dealing with family matters.

At that point, the house had not been showing demolition at all but he was still resetting it because I made the FC paranoid after sharing the experience my other friend had had so everyone was always worried about their house timers.

About two weeks later (he was still with family) I noticed his house was showing in my pending demo timers and mention it in FC chat. We're all "but we thought he had reset it before his flight back out". His childhood friend in the FC who also had family contact information got a hold of him. He repeated that he had gone into his house it was the only reason he had bothered to log in that day. He gets back the next week when there were still 4-5 days left on the timer, walks in and it immediately reset for both of us.

What things did both situations have in common (other than each having one of my characters as a tenant in their house)? Both houses were in Lavender Beds Ward 20 subdivision though different plots, different sizes and different worlds.

Other than that, I can't think of anything they might have had in common that might be useful in trying to track down a bug. In the first case, both of the entrances would have been made around the same time late afternoon/early evening Pacific (he had been logging in after picking his wife up from work and having dinner with her) but I can't remember for certain what time it would have been for the second case (maybe late afternoon also? I really can't remember). I think they happened different times of the year - I know the second case was end of July last year, but I think the first case was late summer/early fall 3 years? ago. I cannot remember the day of the week though if I dig back through Discord messages enough I could probably come up with the actual dates (and then could check the days of the week).

Why don't we hear about this more often? Most players who have gotten a house care enough to enter them on a fairly regular basis. They could easily be hit with the bug on a Monday then have the timer reset when they log back in on Friday. They're not going for a couple of weeks in a row without entering their house so the demolition timer never gets the chance to pop up on their Estate timers.

Even those who infrequently enter would still have to be doing it at whatever time the bug is happening.

For those who care about keeping their houses, better safe than sorry. Just enter it at least once a week if you're online but don't have a habit of visiting it often. Put down a Summoning Bell, Material Supplier or whatever interactive object of your choice that's going to involve non-housing specific data and interact with it a quick moment. If you genuinely care about your house, that much shouldn't feel like a chore.

If you do enter infrequently for whatever reason, watch your demo timer closely when you are online. If you think about it, take a screenshot after you enter with your Estate Timers displayed as proof of entry. If you then get hit by the bug, you've got a screenshot with a date and time stamp that would prove your entry and be massively valuable in helping to identify whatever is causing it.

What would be more helpful is if SE would change the pending demolition notice to a date of last entry notice that would add a pending warning if demolition is going to occur in the next 15 days. Then players who care about this issue would have a helpful tool that shows it has happened even if there is no demo warning yet and they would have useful information to submit on a bug report.

As it stands right now, we're only finding out after it's too late to get the useful information unless we're lucky and just happen to have taken a screenshot inside the house on the date of last entry.

[Ayan_Calvesse]

I was pondering this and wonder if it has to do with the character data refresh. Did either of your friends have alts?

Ever seen when your HUD and everything gets seemingly erased? I know that happens with a write error on the windows/documents folder and that any actions you take cause your client to temporarily disassociate from the server while it rechecks and refreshes that folder (I've tested this with tracking how UI changes can get all wonky) from what I'd seen it seems most often to occur if you submerge your account (so you quit for a month and come back before the 45 days are up) and seems to be worse the larger your ../games/FF XIV ARR folder is; which can get pretty big given its the default screenshots and character profile folder.

[Jojoya]

I was pondering this and wonder if it has to do with the character data refresh. Did either of your friends have alts?

Ever seen when your HUD and everything gets seemingly erased? I know that happens with a write error on the windows/documents folder and that any actions you take cause your client to temporarily disassociate from the server while it rechecks and refreshes that folder (I've tested this with tracking how UI changes can get all wonky) from what I'd seen it seems most often to occur if you submerge your account (so you quit for a month and come back before the 45 days are up) and seems to be worse the larger your ../games/FF XIV ARR folder is; which can get pretty big given its the default screenshots and character profile folder.

One did, one didn't.

What you're describing sounds like a client side problem. It's affecting how data is displayed as opposed to affecting the data to be displayed.

The entrance bug would need to be server side, or something in client-server communication. If it was a client-server communication problem, I would think it would correct itself a couple of seconds later (the game has to track where your character is at any given moment).

That does raise a question for me. Are affected players clicking Enter on the door outside then immediately logging out before their character is fully loaded (assuming that's even possible) and registered as entering? I know how I seem to hang sometimes going into a house but then I never go in to immediately log out. That would be pointless with the way we automatically load in outside of the house the next time we bring the character online. But I suppose there's always a chance that some players might.

[MistakeNot]

It's been a point of contention on the forums too long.

No. No, it hasn't been a point of contention.
Nobody disputes that most of the time it is sufficient to just enter the house to reset the demolition countdown.

What some people do contend is that sometimes just entering the house is not enough, and they have to interact with someting inside to reset the countdown.
If this ever happens it is a bug, but so far nobody has managed to come up with some hard evidence that such a bug exists, only anecdotal claims.

[Espon]

Normally those that say their house was demolished despite going inside it are tenants to a private house and the actual owner hasn't logged on in over 45 days. Only the owner is capable of resetting the timer.