Final Fantasy 14’s broken housing lottery will get fixed soon

Final Fantasy 14 developers say they’ve figured out what was glitching the MMO’s housing lottery and will be correcting the problem shortly. Producer and director Naoki Yashida said that the lottery results from the previous week are preserved and could be used during server maintenance.

Players who win a plot of housing in a lottery with no bugs or other problems will not be required to restart the process or join another lottery. Yoshida requested that anyone with a housing parcel was able to claim it immediately to speed up the process.

The glitch entered the game on April 12 with patch 6. 1, which changed the way housing plots are awarded in the game. Before, everything was first-come/first-served, requiring players to sit through some ungodly waiting times before trying to buy a house. Over a period of nine days, the lottery will randomly award plots to winners. Players have five days to put in for an empty plot; a drawing is held and the winner, chosen at random, has four days to claim the plot.

Instead, users reported the lottery spit out “winners” with the number 0 (supposedly impossible under the system) or did not award the plot to anyone. In other examples, a single player entered the lottery for a plot, and yet was told there was no winner.

Yoshida on Saturday acknowledged the problems and apologized for the frustration they’ve caused. He also explained in greater detail how the lottery works, or is supposed to. Although the housing lottery uses a simple randomization system, players can have more than one character on their account. This means that the game has to set complex conditions so they are eligible for the draw. It took all weekend for developers to untangle what the lottery administration was seeing that caused the bugged outcomes.

Meantime: The “results announcement period” for the first lotto, which was originally scheduled to close on Wednesday, has been extended to an unknown time. Further, the developers aren’t holding any new lotteries until the problems with the first one is fixed.

Getting a house in Final Fantasy 14 “has always been an awful experience,” says Polygon’s official guide. As the Empyreum housing zone has been opened in-game, this means that housing lottery rules have changed. The guide has more details on how the process is supposed to work.

In 2020, Square Enix added 720 plots per server to keep up with demand, effectively doubling a housing supply that had already been expanded the year before. The game issued a moratorium against in-world demolitions and evictions during the peak of the pandemic.