Final Fantasy XIV’s Naoki Yoshida addresses the current state of investigation on the game’s housing lottery botch

For those who missed it, Final Fantasy XIV’s first housing lottery on Saturday ran into some issues… issues like “no winner was selected while there were multiple entrants” or “there was one entrant and the plot still selected no winner.” These issues were not universal, but they were widespread, and producer and director Naoki Yoshida has penned a more lengthy statement today addressing the issues with the lottery system as well as explaining how the system is meant to work.

Players who don’t want a lengthy technical explanation will hopefully be somewhat mollified by the main takeaway placed conveniently at the start of the letter: The team is investigating the issue, another lottery will not occur until these issues are sorted out, and most importantly the team still has records for everyone who entered even if players accepted their gil refunds for losing the plot. While he does not specify a course of action for the team regarding this information, he does specify that no matter what happens next, players need not fear scenarios like accepting the gil refund and thus losing a plot they were previously the only entrant in due to the issues:

We still have the lottery data, and it is possible for us to confirm the status of entry applications through our database server logs. These logs will be referenced to ensure that players who have accepted their gil refund from losing the lottery will not be negatively affected by the measures we will be taking afterwards. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by these issues, but please rest assured regarding this point.

As for the longer technical discussion, Yoshida explains the various conditions that allow the game to check whether or not a character is eligible for entering the housing lottery in the first place, which should have no bearing on the ultimate results drawn for the housing lottery. He states that the team is busy sorting through the log entries for the plots where errors occurred and looking into the conditions that caused this event, although he doesn’t currently have an ETA for fixes. It’s another black eye for the game’s overall housing system and the limitations therein, which has long struggled with availability compared to the number of players; one can only speculate about how long this investigation will take and what the ultimate fixes will be.