Players attempting to buy a new house in Final Fantasy XIV's latest update have been running into a bug with the new lottery system which has caused them to miss out on their desired property - even in cases where they were the only bidder. The MMO game's producer and director Naoki Yoshida wrote a brief post addressing the situation on Saturday, but has now further clarified the situation in a longer write-up.
In his initial announcement, Yoshida said that "there are many patterns involved for the lottery conditions" which caused some speculation about whether there was some hidden complexity to determining the lottery outcome. In the follow-up post, Yoshida clarifies that the patterns he spoke of refer specifically to the entry conditions, and that the actual lottery itself uses a simple randomisation method.
Yoshida says that the team has the lottery data, and that it is possible for them to confirm the status of entry applications through database server logs. They are using these to ensure that players will not be negatively affected if they accepted the refund of their gil deposit offered after losing a lottery which suffered from one of the aforementioned issues.
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