With the release of Final Fantasy XIV Patch 6.1 and the new, much-requested Ishgard Empyreum housing district going live for players to purchase land in, the game’s development team implemented a new lottery system. This system was designed to make plot acquisition fairer, somewhat controversially favouring Free Companies which would then be able to house player apartments within it. While Free Companies and players most certainly put their Gil down for a chance at acquiring their dream plots, for those would-be victors, very few managed to nab their plot.
This is because, even if many players made contributions towards potentially obtaining the plots, they were greeted with the error message “There were no participants in this lottery“. This did not appear to be a one-off issue either, with many impacted, as you can see from my servers plot listings:
Even though plot acquisition in Final Fantasy is “lovingly” nicknamed Housing Savage, the game going up against those eager to take advantage of the Final Fantasy XIV’s housing system takes it to Housing Ultimate levels.
Naoki “YoshiP” Yoshida, Producer and Director of Final Fantasy XIV has stated that his team is aware of the issue, and shared the below statement:
Hello, this is Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director of FINAL FANTASY XIV.
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by the issue with the housing lottery system. Allow me to explain the current situation and our next steps as we investigate the problem.
Firstly, we understand that this is a major issue, and are prioritizing our investigation into the matter. We are working to identify the issue in the corresponding program; however, as the process is very complex and there are many patterns involved for the lottery conditions, it will require some time to pinpoint the problem.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but we ask for your patience a little while longer as focus our efforts on the investigation.
As we investigate and address the issue, we will be extending the result announcement period which was previously set to end on Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 7:59 a.m. (PDT).
* We will not enter into the next lottery cycle until the investigation is complete and the situation is addressed.
We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing to our players. We will continue to work on identifying the cause of the issue and addressing it so that the lottery system correctly determines the winner and displays the proper results.
So, those who were eager to gain their favourite plots might be in for a little bit of a wait to find out if they were successful.
Final Fantasy XIV is now available on the Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
