Naoki Yoshida, producer and director of Final Fantasy 14, has confirmed that the MMO's housing lottery system has now been resolved.
While he acknowledges that the issues were "extensive and persistent", the team has since been able to reproduce the issue, fixed identified errors, verified those fixes, and is now ready to restore the lottery data.
Last month, Yoshida had to apologize to players after it was discovered that the game's new housing lottery system was broken.
It became apparent that the new feature - which came into the game as part of the recent 6.1 Patch - was malfunctioning when some players participating in lotteries received messages informing them that they were unsuccessful because there "were no participants in this lottery", and others were told the winning lottery number was "0", even though that number was unassignable, and no player could select it.
With a fix in sight, however, the game will be put into maintenance mode on Monday, May 16, during which errors will be fixed so that the game can "properly relay lottery results for affected plots to the appropriate servers".
This means winning lottery numbers will be displayed correctly and land purchases finalized accordingly. Temporary suspensions imposed on plot purchases and relocations will be lifted, too. You have until Thursday, May 26 to confirm and finalize your land purchase if you're a lottery winner, so don't hang about; especially as the next lottery will go live later that same day.
So if you had previously received the "winner lottery number of 0" error, double-check your tickets as "some participants may discover that they had, in fact, won the lottery, despite already receiving a refund due to the lottery number error".
"Even if your deposit was refunded due to this system error, your ability to finalize the purchase of a won plot will remain unaffected," Yoshida explains.
"As these housing lottery issues have been significant and caused great stress and frustration in many players, we have no intention of performing a data rollback to forcibly rescind any refunded gil. We will make an announcement regarding the voluntary return of housing deposits once the NPC in question is ready to be implemented."
Did you know Square Enix recently reported increased profits in its latest financial year, with game sales also seeing a slight but noticeable rise largely thanks to the explosive popularity of Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker?
If you're intrigued by Final Fantasy 14 and have yet to give the MMO a go, don't forget that free trials are now back after they - along with digital sales of the main game and expansions, too - were temporarily suspended in order to keep up with the incredibly high demand towards the end of last year. And if you're in need of a Final Fantasy 14 story recap, here's everything from the start of A Realm Reborn to the finale of Shadowbringers.
Looking for a reason to get into the Square Enix MMORPG? Find out why you should play Final Fantasy 14 in 2022.
Final Fantasy 14 devs more likely "to do something light again" for its next project as "you can kinda tell" Yoshi-P is "done" with Final Fantasy 16's "dark fantasy"
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's most painfully boring minigame was originally twice as tedious, but at the last minute Square decided "it might be stressful"
