With the highly anticipated opening of the new residential area, Empyreum, in Final Fantasy XIV’s latest update, 6.1, Newfound Adventure came the announcement that all housing would be determined going forward via housing lottery. The lottery would begin in Empyreum and for the entirety of the Oceania data center. Over the weekend, there were some reports of errors and confusing messages after the entry period showing there were no participants and another one showing the winning number as 0. Naoki Yoshida has responded after the team began investigating.
For those that placed their bids, some who checked were seeing these error messages: "There were no participants in this lottery" and "The winning number is...0. May you have better luck next time". With this housing lottery opening, there were, of course, many people applying for the lottery, and an error with the ‘winning’ number.
In a followup to this initial announcement that there were issues, Yoshida explained what was going on and what the team will be doing to help the situation. They are still investigating what actually happened and working to identify the issues, but because there are so many rules and requirements that have to work in order to hold the housing lotteries properly, he did acknowledge that it will take some time to sort it all out, as well as apologize for the inconvenient start for such a highly anticipated launch:
“In any case, we recognize that this is an especially egregious issue, even throughout our history of service, as this is one of the larger additions to housing and the introduction of the lottery system our players were looking forward to. We will follow up with the measures we will be taking to ensure the issue does not reoccur, but for now, we will do our utmost to identify and address the cause as soon as possible.”
Some of these examples include those who don’t own any property entering and those who are entering for the purpose of relocation, entries by Free Companies, and other eligibility and rules conditions. This then has to combine with how each plot has been bid for, which includes plots bid on by multiple members of the same Free Company.
As a result, they are extending the results announcement period, which was originally set to end on April 20th.
