Player-owned houses in Final Fantasy XIV are being razed without any warning. Reports across multiple servers warrant a warning on the FFXIV subreddit and a thread on their official forums. GMs have already acknowledged the issue by reimbursing affected players, but they’re not able to fully restore their lost properties.

The bug usually occurs after the owners visit the house- just days later. Housing works on a timer: if you don’t visit your house for a set period of time, it’s automatically reclaimed by the server. If it’s reclaimed, 80% of the land fees and 100% of the furnishing are returned to the owner. Square Enix has turned off the demolition timers before, such as during the heat and flooding in Japan. The North American servers also had it turned off last year due to the flooding and damage caused by Hurricane Harvey. However, it’s currently active right now even though numerous reports are surfacing while they attempt to fix the issue.

Players get a full 45 days before scheduled deletion- with two warning emails. However, there have been reports that the email system wasn’t working- all the way back since May of this year.

The housing crisis is something that Square Enix is definitely aware of. Directory Naoki Yoshida knows about the issue and changes were made earlier in 2018 so that players could only own one piece of land, which stop squatting. Smaller servers don’t really have much of an issue because land can be reclaimed due to lower populations. Populated servers are where there are problems due to competition between players for plots.