Island Sanctuaries might not be instanced housing, simmer your hopes

I never hoped for anything that was announced so vaguely on what it is, as a bulky Librarian once said

"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment."

I wish I could pull Live Letter content out of my head without having to hunt on youtube for it. When Island Sanctuary was announced, they talked about it on stream like it was going to be an island that everyone gets, with housing elements where your minions can walk around and you can do little farming activities. This, I believe, is where so many people got the "Stardew Valley meets Animal Crossing meets Chao Garden meets XIV" expectations. Almost immediately after this belief began to grab hold, the same devs came out and walked the hypetrain back hard, telling fans to temper their expectations. I remember this vividly, but I wouldn't even know where to begin finding the clips about this.

Basically I have no dog in this fight, but I agree with OP. Everyone's kinda got sky high expectations about island sanctuary. They think it'll solve the housing problem by giving everyone an instanced island. If they could do instanced islands, why didn't they do instanced housing? Whenever they were asked, we were told they couldn't because of technical limitations. Are those limitations gone now? What changed? It seems weird, right? I bet it'll be some top-down minigame looking thing in a completely separate part of the game and you can't even walk around in it with your character. You just click on stuff and play it like Farmville. And knowing modern gaming, they might even work some mobile element into it and try to charge players for microtransactions.

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Originally Posted by Ilisidi

I suspect that the housing thing comes from an interview last year (Island Sanctuary part starts at about 27 minutes). Which talks about being able to place buildings as part of the customisation process. Which has been taken to mean instanced housing. But I also think it'll be closer to the Mog Garden and buildings be more like the helper NPC you could hire for it

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Thank you for finding this interview.

The most likely first reveal would be fanfest last year. Wouldn't it?
Text only interface would indeed be incredibly lame. Mog Garden XIV however would meet my expectations.

(The Mog Gardens in FFXI are even canonically numerous islands left in the adventurers' care. They came with a story line had monsters running around (and filled your inventory like no tomorrow). I was very surprised and delighted when I noticed the groddy pond become less groddy with each level up. I looked forward with great anticipation to see the final pond upgrade.)

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Originally Posted by Avoidy

Everyone's kinda got sky high expectations about island sanctuary.

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No one has sky high expectations about Island Sanctuary. I don't get why this topic keeps popping up. It's like people don't have enough reasons to bash the community and attack other people, so they fabricate some instead.

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Originally Posted by ryouma17

island sanctuary will most likely be a stardew valley meets the chao garden in sonic adventure 2, just a small place to hangout with our minions/mounts and maybe a bit of light gardening (though the crops we can grow will most likely be limited after all gotta keep the expensive crops exclusive for those homeowners)

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That's what I'm expecting. It may have housing elements and some form of customization, but without being actual housing, like the GC barracks - it's your personal instanced office with your own selected group of npc you can customize, with a glamour mirror and armoire in it, but it's not "your house"

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Originally Posted by Allegor

That's what I'm expecting. It may have housing elements and some form of customization, but without being actual housing, like the GC barracks - it's your personal instanced office with your own selected group of npc you can customize, with a glamour mirror and armoire in it, but it's not "your house"

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gimme all the cat minions curled up in a ball of cute or i unsub and uninstall

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

No one has sky high expectations about Island Sanctuary. I don't get why this topic keeps popping up. It's like people don't have enough reasons to bash the community and attack other people, so they fabricate some instead.

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I mean, it is pretty silly but there are people who do have silly expectations. We literally had a thread in General Discussion just the other day about people thinking they were the reason why the FC/solo split was the way it was the in recent housing addition, because IS was going to be personal instanced housing.

My expectations are tempered.

If it works on day one without being a bug riddled mess it'll already have exceeded my expectations.

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Originally Posted by Illmaeran

The Thavnairian Onion market needs to crash, thankyouverymuch.

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Honestly, I'd be okay with this myself. I belong to a reasonably-active FC (generally a core group of about 30-40 people active, larger during MSQ patch windows) that's welcoming to newcomers, and one thing we try to make sure to have is Thavnairian Onions for the FC members training their chocobos. As the person who handles the gardening loops to ensure we continue to have a stock of onions, I would be totally okay if I could just use FC funds to buy the onions for the FC chest at rates that were not astronomical, instead of it being more cost-effective to keep gardening loops going.

(I grant that if I were selling said onions rather than stocking the FC chest, I might feel differently...)

More seriously, though, I've long said one of the biggest problems with housing is that it gates participation on entire other systems: FC airships/submersibles, and gardening. So if Island Sanctuary does nothing other than provide access to gardening for people who don't have a house, I'll still consider it a win as a feature.

I will be stunningly shocked if Island Sanctuary were full instanced housing.

As I've noted in a different thread, this game's server architecture does not seem well-suited to open-ended instancing, as opposed to "at most X number of things in use"; their workaround seems to be that anything that is truly open-ended in terms of number of active instances has to be a solo environment that gets run largely (save for interactions with specific systems) on the client-side, rather than allocating a server-instanced environment.

This is why you can have an unlimited number of inn rooms, grand company squadron barracks, copies of the Waking Sands interior, etc., but where you will never see another player besides yourself in that environment: that environment simply does not exist on the server.

If Island Sanctuary is a form of instanced housing, I strongly suspect it would be one where you could decorate and garden and play around... but not invite guests over as that would require server-instanced environments. And that seems technologically feasible within this game's environment... but probably not what folks would want from "instanced housing".

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Honestly, I'd be okay with this myself. I belong to a reasonably-active FC (generally a core group of about 30-40 people active, larger during MSQ patch windows) that's welcoming to newcomers, and one thing we try to make sure to have is Thavnairian Onions for the FC members training their chocobos. As the person who handles the gardening loops to ensure we continue to have a stock of onions, I would be totally okay if I could just use FC funds to buy the onions for the FC chest at rates that were not astronomical, instead of it being more cost-effective to keep gardening loops going.

(I grant that if I were selling said onions rather than stocking the FC chest, I might feel differently...)

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Personally at the time they consider this I hope they would consider just changing the Chocobo system in general. The point of abolishing or making cheap the onion, time to dust off the chocobo content. Not looking at it right now, but I'm pretty sure the chocobo still have accuracy boosting skills to purchase -_-''.

Obviously bias'd since I wrote it, but I imagine a chocobo job system with sub-jobs. (/Very/ FFT like). So you can level up jobs and then equip subjobs, there would be no more onion (OR the onion could be used to purchase new jobs- to which when the new content is released your spent onions convert into tokens to buy jobs).

You once commented on one of my longer posts for length, well here is the one on chocobos- KWEH! lol (it's hopefully fine to scan with the tl;dr / hide buttons, but with everything expanded it's fairly big).

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

More seriously, though, I've long said one of the biggest problems with housing is that it gates participation on entire other systems: FC airships/submersibles, and gardening. So if Island Sanctuary does nothing other than provide access to gardening for people who don't have a house, I'll still consider it a win as a feature.

I will be stunningly shocked if Island Sanctuary were full instanced housing.

As I've noted in a different thread, this game's server architecture does not seem well-suited to open-ended instancing, as opposed to "at most X number of things in use"; their workaround seems to be that anything that is truly open-ended in terms of number of active instances has to be a solo environment that gets run largely (save for interactions with specific systems) on the client-side, rather than allocating a server-instanced environment.

This is why you can have an unlimited number of inn rooms, grand company squadron barracks, copies of the Waking Sands interior, etc., but where you will never see another player besides yourself in that environment: that environment simply does not exist on the server.

If Island Sanctuary is a form of instanced housing, I strongly suspect it would be one where you could decorate and garden and play around... but not invite guests over as that would require server-instanced environments. And that seems technologically feasible within this game's environment... but probably not what folks would want from "instanced housing".

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We know the Island Sanctuary will have friends over, unless I made a false memory lol (Yoshida said).

I imagine though that the system is going to be very much node based homely-ness, such that you might be able to get a lot of vibes of growth and ownership but wont be placing a billon objects by hand. Akin to a WoW Garrison using node based ideas, but far more homestead theme'd. Quite a few single player RPGs use this concept, where you purchase upgrades and the whole place changes for you. FFXI also has mog islands so we can look at that for inspiration (as some of the content already confirmed for FFXIV is in FFXI's mog gardens).

I really doubt it will be instanced housing, at least at the start, but I feel like we might be able to get there in the future. For example one suggestion I had for the system early on is allow the player to build a house with prebuilt setup. To save resources it might be akin to the Howel's Moving Castle door (that allows you to change the portal the door connects to), and so you could connect the door of your Island house to an inn room already in the game. This way you have a very pretty, fairly featured, room right away. Later SE might be able to change it to your apartment room and hopefully around that time they've upgraded the system so there is 1:1 # of apartments (surprisingly there is not right now lol), and add a second floor and other concepts. Perhaps a give players some items they can hand place outside (like you've the node system that allows you to make large changes, and then a small allowance for outdoor furnishings).

I can imagine the system could be come instanced housing... Just also highly doubt it'll start that way. Hopefully the features and content the system is planned with is cool. It's not bad they said it's casual and optional, but hopefully that doesn't mean it lacks all elements of rewarding nature lol. (Say WoW's garrisons had too much reward and messed with the economy, and a way too baby-sitting required war table that messed with people being able to be free in the world, but it did do a lot of really neat things that made it pretty valuable with, imo, the biggest issue being they abandoned the content for the most part).

Chocobo raising might be a thing, which also inspires me back to the first part of the post on new chocobo content :D.

If this content does well I feel like a FC variant would be hamlets, and that could be really fun. I haven't really made a dedicated post to housing outside of my airship one (which uses the node based concepts to reduce server stress), but I have made a few large posts in other threads on it. The TL;DR.. is that of akin to Dark Cloud, industrial Island, still some elements of that Animal Crossing, but for FC. Where the reputation UI (that FC currently has) is greatly expanded and relevant, very long term, projects can be completed by FCs. Including even longer term / continual content around it like Hamlet Defense or Stronghold Assaults (connecting it to PvE, and potentially optional PvP where FC vs FC).

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

[T]his game's server architecture does not seem well-suited to open-ended instancing, as opposed to "at most X number of things in use"; their workaround seems to be that anything that is truly open-ended in terms of number of active instances has to be a solo environment that gets run largely (save for interactions with specific systems) on the client-side, rather than allocating a server-instanced environment.

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When you say "server architecture" are you referring to the hardware or the processes that make up the collection of services that our clients interact with? If it is a physical datacenter issue that's a breathtaking level of incompetence I struggle to attribute to their operations team. IMO it has something to do with the either the design or implementation of the ward system that makes it require so much physical hardware.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

If Island Sanctuary is a form of instanced housing, I strongly suspect it would be one where you could decorate and garden and play around... but not invite guests over as that would require server-instanced environments. And that seems technologically feasible within this game's environment... but probably not what folks would want from "instanced housing".

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As Shougun remembered it was stated in one of the Live Letters that other players can visit.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

I have a lot of doubts that the server architecture itself is to blame. Rather it has something to do with the either the design or implementation of the ward system that makes it require so much physical hardware. If it is a physical datacenter issue that's a breathtaking level of incompetence I struggle to attribute to their operations team.


As Shougun remembered it was stated in one of the Live Letters that other players can visit.

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Well this game is essentially parading around the rotting corpse of FF11 so technical debt messing up plans is not exactly something that should be dismissed out of hand.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

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When you say "server architecture" are you referring to the hardware or the processes that make up the collection of services that our clients interact with? If it is a physical datacenter issue that's a breathtaking level of incompetence I struggle to attribute to their operations team. IMO it has something to do with the either the design or implementation of the ward system that makes it require so much physical hardware.

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I have a very hard time believing them whenever they say they can't do something because of engine limitations, due to the number of times they have said this and then did it later anyway. Not to mention all the instances of supposedly impossible things being accomplished by mods.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

I have a very hard time believing them whenever they say they can't do something because of engine limitations, due to the number of times they have said this and then did it later anyway. Not to mention all the instances of supposedly impossible things being accomplished by mods.

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That's because an engine really is just a framework for your code to work. If you have a function that you want to implement, it may have some limitations because of how the engine is structured, sure, but it's still possibly doable. Just to give you two examples of what I mean by this:

1 - Some stuff they wanted to implement didn't manage to go through because of how their code was structured, which interfered with other functions. An example of this is the Glam Dresser in housing. When they tried it, if they attempted to edit the house's furniture while someone was using the glam dresser, the codes would interfere with one another and cause the game to freak out and crash.

Now, is this doable? It honestly is, they just need to find a way to make the Glam Dresser's menu be on a different instance than housing. Maybe a personal menu like your character profile or adventurer plate editor menu are, but only be accessed not by your standard button menu, but by clicking on the furniture. Otherwise how else would you access Armoires or Unending Journey if someone edited the house? Sure, Glam Dressers are more complex, which is probably what still causes some bugs, but ultimately the principle is the same.

2 - Take a simple game-making software like Ren'py or RPG Maker. You can make an RPG in Ren'py (though it likely won't be the prettiest thing in the universe) or a Visual Novel in RPG Maker. In fact, it's been done. The engine is just a framework to make a specific sort of game, but you can repurpose it to make other different kinds of stuff if you have the know-how.

This is why technically speaking "everything is possible" with an engine. You just need to know how to program what you want with that framework in mind. It's going to take you time and some elbow grease, you'll likely encounter some random bugs because all code does that. But that's normal, and you'll be expecting them. As you would on anything involving computer code more complex than print "Hello World".

It's why modders are capable of making mods and add-ons for stuff the dev team claims to be out of their purview or capabilities. So in theory, yes, you CAN make about anything with a gaming engine. Question is how detailed you want it, how it'll be integrated and how much time you're willing to spend on making it.

Hell, a lot of the problems with Hrothgar and Viera hairstyles\headgear has been just changing a boolean (a yes\no metadata switch), which modders have gone in and changed. But other problems and other features may very well be more complicated.

But impossible? Not at all, just takes time and for sure some effort.

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Originally Posted by Midareyukki

addendum for further clarification

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The older engine SE had which was riddled with spaghetti code was likely a very poorly structured framework with god knows what in the same instance. I don't know if SE is still using this engine, but if they are, we know they fixed it... but a weirdly designed engine will always be hard to work with. It'd be like trying to wrestle with the world's most stubborn mule.

It's why programmers have no better satisfaction sometimes than just "alright, bring it all down, start over, but cleaner" xD
Though they'll likely tear some hairs out because it just means more work. More work, though, that's better and easier and won't be as annoying of a mule.

Though also, while the servers need compatibility with the engine you're using, the servers themselves have their own framework to work. Written in a completely different language than the one the game is written on. So unless there's a problem in the link between the server's code and the game engine, if there's a problem with the engine it won't be solved by going into the server's code itself. At least not usually.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Well this game is essentially parading around the rotting corpse of FF11 so technical debt messing up plans is not exactly something that should be dismissed out of hand.

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They've stated on several occasions that there's no 1.0 code left and what tech debt exists was due to ARR's accelerated schedule. Even by non-gaming enterprise service standards XIV stacks up well. You don't get that by letting old code rot.

I suspect the tech-debt they're wrestling with is that they've hit their scalability limit with their current architecture. I would like to think that a wholesale replacement of the ward system would be out of the question. It should not be a technical blocker to adding a completely new and far more resource efficient housing service. Assuming they go that route it would make a lot of sense for them to provide incentives to move for folks to move out of the wards.

Unfortunately it's a huge amount of work and may not fit into their budget or schedule if done all at once. The good news is that building out that infrastructure can be staged. The Island Sanctuaries feature sounds like a great way to verify they got the scalability right before moving on.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

I have a very hard time believing them whenever they say they can't do something because of engine limitations, due to the number of times they have said this and then did it later anyway. Not to mention all the instances of supposedly impossible things being accomplished by mods.

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My very strong suspicion is their "can't" is code for "we couldn't get the funding greenlit".

Graphical mods are a touchy subject. I've heard the clipping excuse any number of times but I don't know how sensitive the team is to that sort of criticism. FWIW I'm firmly in the camp that those bothered by it can just not use the offending item. I'm also of the opinion that lore is a terrible excuse for denying certain QoL features.

OTOH mods may actually be doing things that either the client or server cannot support. Some possibilities are adding extra elements (nodes, bones) to the models or even extra animations. These take space not only in the conversation between client and server but also in the database. Sometimes they don't have enough room in the various indexes used to look up element properties.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

Graphical mods are a touchy subject. I've heard the clipping excuse any number of times but I don't know how sensitive the team is to that sort of criticism. FWIW I'm firmly in the camp that those bothered by it can just not use the offending item.

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This honestly makes me chuckle a little. Not because it's bad that people don't like clipping. Truth be told, you'll find clipping in every game if you look hard enough. Not every bit of model will be scrutinized the same way. But too much is jarring...

But rather that they can't be mad that stuff clips when Endsinger's own hair clips through itself. It's visible the moment you set foot in the instance. Endsinger is nothing but a gigantic head with long Amano-esque hair. It's staring at you in the face.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

They've stated on several occasions that there's no 1.0 code left and what tech debt exists was due to ARR's accelerated schedule. Even by non-gaming enterprise service standards XIV stacks up well. You don't get that by letting old code rot.

I suspect the tech-debt they're wrestling with is that they've hit their scalability limit with their current architecture. I would like to think that a wholesale replacement of the ward system would be out of the question. It should not be a technical blocker to adding a completely new and far more resource efficient housing service. Assuming they go that route it would make a lot of sense for them to provide incentives to move for folks to move out of the wards.

Unfortunately it's a huge amount of work and may not fit into their budget or schedule if done all at once. The good news is that building out that infrastructure can be staged. The Island Sanctuaries feature sounds like a great way to verify they got the scalability right before moving on.

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The game is not the rotting corpse, but it's parading it around by virtue of 1.0 being such an awful game that they had to completely remake it. That's what forced them into what you call ARR's accelerated schedule.

VERMINION
TWOOOOOO

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

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When you say "server architecture" are you referring to the hardware or the processes that make up the collection of services that our clients interact with?

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The processes overall.

It's vanishingly rare to find a server architecture that isn't 100% virtualized that does not either have a hard cap on resources or that has horrible performance when it gets past where they should've put a hard cap. The former is equivalent to when you hit a website and get a "Too busy, come back later." error page, the latter is equivalent to when you hit a website and it doesn't tell you that it's too busy... it just takes 7 minutes to finish sending you the webpage you asked for.

Architectures that are 100% virtualized avoid some of those problems if well-designed, inasmuch as it can dynamically spin up additional resources as needed, but that does require you to write things such that all the associated "things" it needs to work on don't need to be on the same physical resource... which is oft-overlooked and causes no end of headaches in fully-cloud-hosted systems.

And MMOs are honestly one of the the most complex cases for server ecosystems overall; you have servers dedicated to inventory management, to player recordkeeping, to serving specific in-world zones (or instanced duties), etc., and they're usually all tied together in what looks like the world's most nightmarish subway map.

As an example: it doesn't matter how many copies of a dungeon instance you can spawn, if you still choke some other server responsible for handling inventory. (And if you have the inventory server capable of spinning up new resources, you potentially need a way to be able to pass around the responsibility for a given player's inventory from server to server, to allow load balancing at runtime. And...)

Even if you do hypothetically do that right, it doesn't solve every MMO scalability problem, and it introduces some new and different problems along the way; witness that Star Citizen and New World, both of which run entirely on cloud architecture and can hypothetically scale dynamically, still have issues of their own. (And even New World still limited servers to 2000 players on at a time, due to a variety of reasons. Hence their ridiculous queues at launch.)

So I'm not going to throw too many stones; that FFXIV cannot scale entirely dynamically is less a failure on the part of SQEX and more the reality of the era in which this server architecture originates. (Especially since while we know the client shares no code with 1.x's client, we have every reason to think that the server probably still does... and truthfully, I wouldn't be shocked if 1.x's servers shared code with FFXI's back when they were made.)

We know for a fact that the servers are not virtualized. We also know that they do have a hard cap on resources; if it runs out of instance servers for a duty you need, the roulette just doesn't pop until one is ready, and if too many people are inside houses (and thus the housing servers have hit capacity), you just can't go inside of any houses. (This happened -- quite a bit -- right around Endwalker launch.)

An architecture like that doesn't mean that you're stuck forever, of course, but it does mean that you can't make major changes quickly... and when you do make major changes to a live service, you need to be really careful that you don't break everything else.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

As Shougun remembered it was stated in one of the Live Letters that other players can visit.

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If it's something you can have friends visit -- or put more precisely, where you can both be there at the same time -- it's something that has to have a server presence in order to handle your locations and interactions with the shared world. And if that's the case then, yeah, I strongly doubt it'll be straight up instanced housing.

I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

And it's possible; they may have been working very quietly on major changes to the server architecture behind the scenes -- they've certainly needed to do a lot of infrastructure work as it is to support the upcoming datacenter travel! -- and maybe they've got a good way to have a more open-ended number of instanced resources now!

I'm just also not holding my breath.