Namely, the bug in Final Fantasy 14 was discovered after the initial drawing of the lottery winners on Saturday. During the process of bidding, a player or a free company is assigned a number that starts from one and increments for every new lottery bid submitted on the plot. However, the system that relayed the lottery information to the servers wasn’t functioning properly, leaving some plots to have an assigned winning number of zero – meaning that effectively, it would designate a winner who did not exist.
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Square Enix apologized for the mishap and opened communication with its player-base instantly, explaining that they would halt the lottery process until the source of the problem was found and addressed. Given the nature of the bug, winners who have been successfully selected by the lottery system will not be impacted by these issues and may continue to enjoy Ishgard housing to their heart’s content. The plots that drew the number zero, on the other hand, will be put under a delicate process.
Firstly, Square Enix will implement a fix to the lottery system that will now correctly relay the information to the server, ensuring that this bug never occurs in the future. Secondly, they will look into the data from the lottery draw to ascertain the true winners of the “zero” plots for the sake of maintaining ultimate fairness. Therefore, Final Fantasy 14 players who registered at the affected plots will not be required to submit their lottery bid a second time.
Players who withdrew their refund prior to discovering that the system was bugged will have their gil collected by the lottery system through means that will be announced at a later date. The game director of Final Fantasy 14, Naoki Yoshida, explained that the process of resolving the issue lay in reproducing it internally, applying a fix, verifying that it worked correctly, and then – lastly – restoring the lottery data through server maintenance across all Worlds.
Naoki Yoshida stated that he was deeply sorry to have disappointed the hopes of the Final Fantasy 14 community and assured them that the results of the lottery drawing were safely preserved.
Final Fantasy 14 is available now on PC, PS4, and PS5.
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Source: Final Fantasy 14
