Players looking to get their hands on new Ishgardian private and Free Company housing in Final Fantasy XIV Online may be out of luck following a drawing riddled with issues.
As part of the long-anticipated Patch 6.1, continuing the story introduced in the latest DLC expansion, Endwalker, players received the opportunity to participate in a lottery for housing in Ishgard’s residential district, Empyreum. This housing district is the newest addition to the residential areas in FFXIV, including Gridania’s Lavender Beds and Limsa Lominsa’s Mist.
However, numerous issues occurred on the day of the drawing and resulted in few players gaining access to new housing. Various plots in the wards of Empyreum display the winner being number “0,” which is not a number that could have been drawn in the lottery. Others say that no players participated in the lottery for that plot, therefore leaving the plot dormant and uninhabited. These issues do not appear to be affecting Ishgardian apartments, though not many are available for players to purchase.
According to players in the FFXIV subreddit, all unowned plots in the game—which aren’t many—are showcasing similar error messages. The Lodestone, which is the official FFXIV community website, acknowledged the errors with the housing lottery system. “We are investigating and responding to this issue as soon as possible while checking the entries in our database,” developers said.
It is unclear how the housing will be distributed to players that participated in the lottery since even those that may have won would not know due to current errors. More information regarding the issues is expected to be released in the coming weeks.
Update April 17, 12:03pm CT: Naoki Yoshida, producer and director of FFXIV, has announced via a Lodestone update post that the team is continuing to investigate the issues, though notes that “the process is very complex and there are many patterns involved for lottery conditions.” The result announcement period for the housing lottery will be extended to an unannounced date.
