Alongside the new Ishgardian Empyreum housing ward, Final Fantasy 14 introduced a new housing lottery system to determine which characters or Free Companies won plots of land in the Newfound Adventure patch. However, when the new lottery system pulled its first winners on April 16th, several errors occurred, including one that caused several plots of land to be assigned to nonexistent players.
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The Final Fantasy 14 team has been toiling away to fix the error, and has communicated with its fans every step of the way. So far, it has successfully reproduced the issue and identified the error, and as of April 25th, it has verified the fixes it implemented. According to Yoshida, Final Fantasy 14 is currently restoring the data from the glitched lottery–a process that will take nearly 2 weeks. Provided the process is not delayed further, the fix will conclude with a final maintenance on May 16th, one month after the glitched lottery pull took place.
Until it is resolved, relocation and sales of all plots in Final Fantasy 14 will remain frozen. Ever humble, Yoshida recognized the disruption this caused, and apologized for the inconvenience–a total of 3 times in this progress report alone. What he had hoped would be a relatively swift resolution is taking much longer. In the meantime, many plots in the Empyreum wards remain empty.
Many Final Fantasy 14 fans are at their wits end with the housing system. Though decorating personal spaces is something most MMORPG players value highly in their games, Final Fantasy 14’s system has been riddled with problems since the beginning. Even some of the most patient players are growing restless with the prolonged recovery period of this particular snafu.
That said, it is obvious Final Fantasy 14 is working hard to recover from the situation, and is keeping its players appraised along the way. Many hope the lessons it learned from this incident will help it improve the system in the future, and are willing to wait a few more weeks for the problems to be resolved.
Final Fantasy 14 is available now on PC, PS4, and PS5.
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