Final Fantasy XIV housing lottery is halted until the team finds a fix, says director

gamepur.com:

Final Fantasy XIV had its first housing lottery last week, and sadly it was a colossal mess. The team at Square Enix is actively looking to fix the problem, but the lottery’s been shut down until a solution is found.

Housing in the MMO has always been difficult due to plot scarcity, so the lottery sounded like a good idea on paper. The problem revolved around the number zero: players couldn’t receive a number lower than one, so if zero came up as the winner, no one actually could actually claim the housing plot. While that didn’t affect every drawing, it’s still a problem for hopeful homeowners.

Thus, Square Enix “will be halting the lottery for all plots of land” for the time being. Director and producer Naoki Yoshida said as much in the latest Lodestone update. To fix the problem, Square is undergoing a four-step process, which involves “reproducing the issue, fixing identified errors, verifying fixes, [and] restoring lottery data.” Once that process has been completed, Final Fantasy XIV’s housing lottery system will return.

In the meantime, you can occupy yourself with other activities like FF XIV Heardle. It’s a Wordle-like game that challenges you to name music tracks from the MMO. Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi would probably do pretty well, considering he “got addicted” to FF XIV.