Did Island Sanctuary satisfy any reasons you want a house?

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

I never thought I'd say this, but I also prefer it to my house situation ATM. Now that very well could change once I hit max level and have caught all the animals I want, but time will tell!. Island Sanctuary is pretty barebones at this point, and I have a rather decent sized list of things I'd like to see them implement and/or improve upon, but I've not hated my time there, so that's a plus. lol.

As far as my house situation... I'm pretty much a solo player and so I have visitors to my house maaaaaaybe once a month or so. It's incredibly rare. For MB things I go to Limsa. For glamour I'm forced to go to a major city. I haven't gardened in awhile. The extra storage for my enormous surplus of furniture is probably the biggest perk ATM. So for me, housing doesn't have that big of a leg up over IS at this point. If they were to make a few additions to IS, I could almost see myself giving up my personal and FC house. I hate feeling tied to a sub anyway, so it would be nice to not have that burden. But again, that's gonna depend on how IS plays out, and if I toss it aside once I have all the goodies I want. :P I'm cautiously optimistic at this time, and that's saying A LOT for me when it comes to this game.

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It seems an unpopular unpopular opinion after a week to be a little positive of the content. I look at it for what it is though. Ever since it came out, I have pretty much only been inside IS. I queue from it, of course I am quite the AFKer, and I am not even logged in all day doing other things or playing other games. I do have my gripes about it, in terms of customization mostly. I have the goal of glamours and the other rewards, after I get those, I may or may not still interact with the content. I mean, aside from setting things to sell, for potential future rewards/expansions.

Also a solo player here, and I never get visitors to my house. I can use the marketboard that's fairly close to my house, but if I am actively making glamours or changing up my plates, I am typically in Gridania, and the Gridania inn. I was in Ul'dah more when I was afking in the gold saucer though. Unfortunately, I still need to level up my crafters if I want to take actual housing seriously. Apparently, I will want to do so if I want to customize the IS too, unfortunately.

At most I assumed the island was going to alleviate the crossbreeding market locked down by house owners. Silly me, lol.

Sadly the island is nowhere close to satisfying my housing needs and wants. Though I had low expectations from the start I was hoping that the island would have at least allowed me to use some of the furnishings I have accumulated over the years in-order personalize the place. I was also hoping to be able to plant crops from the main game. Instead we ended up with an FF XIV version of WoW garrisons with a worse grind and less function. I know YoshiP tried to temper expectations but to me no matter how you slice it the island is a fail and won't keep my subscription past the month I signed up to try them out.

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

It seems an unpopular unpopular opinion after a week to be a little positive of the content. I look at it for what it is though. Ever since it came out, I have pretty much only been inside IS. I queue from it, of course I am quite the AFKer, and I am not even logged in all day doing other things or playing other games. I do have my gripes about it, in terms of customization mostly. I have the goal of glamours and the other rewards, after I get those, I may or may not still interact with the content. I mean, aside from setting things to sell, for potential future rewards/expansions.

Also a solo player here, and I never get visitors to my house. I can use the marketboard that's fairly close to my house, but if I am actively making glamours or changing up my plates, I am typically in Gridania, and the Gridania inn. I was in Ul'dah more when I was afking in the gold saucer though. Unfortunately, I still need to level up my crafters if I want to take actual housing seriously. Apparently, I will want to do so if I want to customize the IS too, unfortunately.

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Solo players unite! Next time I go datacenter crawling, I'll check out the house ;)

There are a lot of good ideas out there for how they could flesh out activities and interaction, personalization, and UI/controls. I really do hope SE will take into consideration some of the ideas floating around as I feel like they have a fairly decent base to build upon.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

Solo players unite! Next time I go datacenter crawling, I'll check out the house ;)

There are a lot of good ideas out there for how they could flesh out activities and interaction, personalization, and UI/controls. I really do hope SE will take into consideration some of the ideas floating around as I feel like they have a fairly decent base to build upon.

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Uniting wouldn't make us solo players anymore!

You can visit, but I think most people are surprised by what they find the couple times it's happened in the past. My house looks like a hoarder's.

There's a lot they could do for sure, I think it really just depends on how much they want to invest in the future of the content. There are a lot of things I would have done different conceptually.

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

Uniting wouldn't make us solo players anymore!

You can visit, but I think most people are surprised by what they find the occasional times they have. My house looks like a hoarder's.

There's a lot they could do for sure, I think it really just depends on how much they want to invest in the future of the content. There are a lot of things I would have done different conceptually.

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My tiny sliver of optimism starts wavering when I dwell on that thought for too long. lol. I don't think SE has that great of a track record when it comes to their optional/side-content. Shooot, we could extend that to some of the main features of the game, but that's an enormous rant for another day. For now, I'm trying to remain hopeful. ><

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

My tiny sliver of optimism starts wavering when I dwell on that thought for too long. lol. I don't think SE has that great of a track record when it comes to their optional/side-content. Shooot, we could extend that to some of the main features of the game, but that's an enormous rant for another day. But yeah, I'm trying to remain hopeful. ><

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I had no expectations going in, and none for the future either. I will be pleasantly surprised if they do good updates, more so in terms of rewards. If it's like the SE I think I know, the content will be dropped by the end of EW.

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Originally Posted by Raoabolic

At most I assumed the island was going to alleviate the crossbreeding market locked down by house owners. Silly me, lol.

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Want to use the gardens at my house for a while? I'll be happy to let you take control for a few months to see if you really enjoy the crossbreeding game.

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

I had no expectations going in, and none for the future either. I will be pleasantly surprised if they do good updates, more so in terms of rewards. If it's like the SE I think I know, the content will be dropped by the end of EW.

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I suspect that will depend on player response over the course of the expansion. If enough players continue to use and enjoy it, they'll continue to update.

I didn't want a house at all, so there was nothing to satisfy.

As for the island, it feels like a beta for things to come. Hope there's something more than just setting mammets to work at some point, otherwise I'll be dropping it once I get the rewards I want.

Absolutely not. I maintain that instanced housing would've been a better use of resources than an island where all you do is click on things.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Has Island Sanctuary satisfied at least part of your reasons for wanting a house?

If so, where did it "hit the spot"?

What does it still lack that you expect to get from a house?

What has been the overall impact on your desire to get a house?

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If the island had the ability to grow plants like you can in houses I think that would meet my needs.

For a while I wanted a house but honestly I think it was because of the buzz around the houses. Tried an apartment, and I absolutely suck at decorating.

Having seen some of the absolutely stunning decors that many people have done I can see where that would be end-game, and I don't think the island would ever be able to come close to matching.

It is nice though having a place to get away to that's private, and right now the crafting and such is very enjoyable but I imagine after purchasing everything on the wish list from the island vendor it will lose a lot of the appeal. Hoping that there will be additional items added to the vendors as time goes on.

Great question!

Island sanctuary is basically you running a sweatshop. It could have been much more.

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Originally Posted by Vespar

Island Sanctuary was REPEATEDLY stated that it wouldnt be a means to satisfy any housing need. So no, I didnt expect it would fulfill housing needs. And it hasnt. I still have mountains of housing rewards Im unable to use.
That being said though I do quite agree that now having seen what they are capable of in terms of INSTANCED solo content, I wonder why we cant have such a housing format.

We are constantly given housing furnishings as reward but all too few can use them due to housing demand, especially if said rewards are "outdoor furnishings" as Apartments do not allow for such functionality. Which leads me into my argument. If Island Sanctuary is possible, then so is SOLO instanced housing. I hope that after using Island Sanctuary as a trial run of sorts, the developers will try to create another option for housing. One especially for the common players who have otherwise been incapable of obtaining regardless of their many futile attempts.

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You do realize that they are pointedly not capable of instanced housing. The day Island Sanctuary came out, entire servers were locked out of housing wards and their island because they use the same server. I cannot imagine the strain real instanced housing would cause. They simply do not have the server space, apparently.

No I still want my erp brothel.

no of course not, its nothing like housing we cant design, choose....anything
its a side game that some will love and thats excellent! ♥ but it's not even remotely close to housing.

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Originally Posted by BIues

You do realize that they are pointedly not capable of instanced housing. The day Island Sanctuary came out, entire servers were locked out of housing wards and their island because they use the same server. I cannot imagine the strain real instanced housing would cause. They simply do not have the server space, apparently.

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You mean it's like every player decided to check out their new Island at the same time, causing instance servers to be temporarily overloaded.

I haven't had problems getting into my housing on any of my characters or on my islands for my characters that have them since Saturday night.

It's only a problem when everyone wants to get into their housing or Island Sanctuary at the same time. Now that people have had a chance to see what the content is like, it's no longer an issue.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Just the same, it has a few of the features that players frequently mention when talking about why they want a house (gardening, larger private space, outdoor area, etc.).

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While I enjoy Island Sanctuary for what it is... I would argue that the "gardening" in Island Sanctuary is not the "gardening" that people want houses for; yes, you can grow things (yay!), but they are not things like... say, crafting materials. Or Thavnairian onions.

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Originally Posted by NekoMataMata

This. Right now it seems to be just a bit of a daily/weekly thing. This isn't bad on its own but IS was sort of advertised, at least in my opinion as something we'd be able to customize to some degree to make it your own. You can't really do that though sadly.

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I actually wouldn't rule this out yet. I strongly suspect we're going to unlock new customizations as time goes on, whether via the Island Sanctuary or as rewards for other contents/seasonal events/whatever.

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Originally Posted by Xylira

The existence of Island Sanctuaries shows that SE has the capability to give access to on demand personal instances to everyone in a way that won't crash the servers, and has methods to throttle for overcrowding and eject afk people from said instances.

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It actually demonstrably did cause stability/reliability issues for Balmung at the very least, based on forum threads about island sanctuary being so overloaded that people could not get into their actual normal houses (since evidently they run the Island Sanctuary instances from the same pool as housing interior instances). I know on Leviathan we had a few rough patches the first few days as well, but they did pass reasonably quickly.

That said, after the initial spike, Primal and Crystal seem to be handling it pretty well. (Aether is, I gather, not having a great time of things, though I have no alt there to know either way.) However, I think you can argue a lot of people tried out Island Sanctuary and then went "eh, not what I hoped" and that's why the instance servers recovered and the load issues were only temporary.

Conversely, if they had true instanced housing and people got all their wishes, I do not think the pressure on the instance servers would go away so readily...

I have a house but I would still enjoy IS even if I didn't. I don't conflate the two.

The only thing I was sad about for IS was there was fundamentally no exploration. I feel they missed an opportunity by making it zoom-zoom and being able to get from one end to the other in 10s. There's no hidden caves for spelunking (and jump puzzles), no swamps or winding paths through shifting bamboo groves. Could have extended its lifespan significantly, especially if animal hunting involved more exploration instead of just running around at lightspeed. Think GW2 jumping puzzles which are more an exercise in exploration than soul-crushing accuracy.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

You mean it's like every player decided to check out their new Island at the same time, causing instance servers to be temporarily overloaded.

I haven't had problems getting into my housing on any of my characters or on my islands for my characters that have them since Saturday night.

It's only a problem when everyone wants to get into their housing or Island Sanctuary at the same time. Now that people have had a chance to see what the content is like, it's no longer an issue.

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So then why are people still getting the error?

I have housing, and no, its nothing alike.
Housing is my house, where I have all my things and all, IS is...a part time job Tataru gave me. Nothing there is mine, I'm the physical laborarer and manager or something. Merlwyb is the owner, Tataru the CEO. I just work for them. And then at the end of the work day I go back to my house and hug my plushies.

Nope all you get on it is a cozy hut with no enclosed walls.

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Originally Posted by Derio

No. I would prefer Instanced housing with smaller neighborhoods and more of a exploration content max players cap if they need it.

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How cool would that be?? If we could have our own instanced housing that would be a small neighborhood that you could share with friends to build however you want? I don't expect to ever get such a thing but I think it'd be so much more fun than the current housing wards where half the time it's dead and tons of people wish they could live near their friends but can't.

I had a personal medium for a long time. Got rid of it since I never used it for anything. Got an apartment instead. Barely ever visit it. Housing does nothing for me.

IS I visit every day because there is actually something to do there.

We need a house even if it's fully decorated and in a nice location. One that has what a house would normally have a living area, bedroom, kitchen etc. We don't have to have the option to customize it although would be nice if there were different housing styles we could choose from upon upgrading it. The Cabin is more of a welcome center than what one would traditionally call a cabin(living space) at least in my view.

I'm spending way to much time in IS and being an addicted person with alts that's not a good thing.

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Originally Posted by Ayan_Calvesse

So then why are people still getting the error?

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What world and what time of day? I could see Balmung and Mateus possibly still having problems because they have both have over 16k end game characters compared to the 13-14k on the other NA worlds. EU worlds have 11-12k and JP worlds are all under 10k except for Tonberry (just over that).

But I've been popping in and out of the Island Sanctuaries for my characters on Coeurl during the afternoon and evening prime time since Sunday without getting the error. With 4 difficult characters I'm switching between, you'd think I'd be hitting the error on at least one of them.

Balmung seems to be better I don't know if they did anything to alleviate the pressure there during the last maintenance or if activity has just dropped off.

I very much like my house free of sassy mammets. So I reckon no.

No, but I didn't expect it to. It's not housing and the lack of customisation means it's definitely not the place of my dreams. Even visiting seems pointless, 'Come and see my island! It's exactly the same as your island'.

I do like the fact that this is optional and not tied to progression because while I had fun at the start, I'm now at level 9 and already slightly bored with it. I've seen most of the island and the chores are getting repetitive. I'm not even sure I'll bother to catch all the rare animals. I'd definitely pay cowries for a 'Hide all Mammets' option though.
It sounds like there is a link to 'Expert Crafts' that seems a bit odd when crafting and gathering were explicitly stated as not being needed. There's a big difference between 'not needed' and 'not needed unless you want to get everything'.

I am surprised people are comparing it unfavourably to WoWs Garrison. I didn't find the Garrison fun but having it tied to progression meant, I went there every day. The burn-out from that was a big factor in why I ended up playing FF.
However, I still have fond memories of building up my Farm in the MoP expansion. That was more limited but it had story connected to it as well as fun mini-games and somehow it felt more 'mine' than either the garrison or the Island Sanctuary. I was so sorry those little farms were abandoned and not built on in later expansions.

This is a bit too impersonal to keep me engaged for long. I think I'll just get everything I want on my main and then forget about it.

Am still of the mindset that IS was our compromise for instanced housing since they clearly do not want to go that route. They chose to spend dev time on this, rather than IH...so what does that tell you? They also literally slapped it onto our current housing servers as well (which is why there were so many congestion issues in certain servers) so that also tells me they aren't interested in buying more servers for an IH set up. Unless they plan to stick IH on the servers we have but I would be terrified of the wait period to even get into your house, island, apartment, etc.

The devs seem pretty dedicated to keeping actual housing exclusive so best we can do is hope they continue to update IS and bring more customization options there.

No. It failed to decouple the game features that are gated by ward house ownership. Even worse they added self-contained systems that look like the gated features. Square's track record with maintaining old systems is awful so I expect that to pretty much be an abandoned system by 7.0 or 7.1. Would happy to be wrong of course.

Like somebody else pointed out they picked an awful spot for the "Cozy Hut". The one saving grace of Island Sanctuary is that's the exact theme I want as an instanced house (I hate snow). But if the Hut is where any potential user customizable house will be planted I will be extremely disappointed. Both my house and the FC house I manage have fantastic views in the Mist.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

No. It failed to decouple the game features that are gated by ward house ownership. Even worse they added self-contained systems that look like the gated features. Square's track record with maintaining old systems is awful so I expect that to pretty much be an abandoned system by 7.0 or 7.1. Would happy to be wrong of course.

Like somebody else pointed out they picked an awful spot for the "Cozy Hut". The one saving grace of Island Sanctuary is that's the exact theme I want as an instanced house (I hate snow). But if the Hut is where any potential user customizable house will be planted I will be extremely disappointed. Both my house and the FC house I manage have fantastic views in the Mist.

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To be fair, they said IS was going to not be actual housing and for expectations to be dramatically lowered on that front. Gardening would be separate, customization would be separate, etc. There wasn't going to be any decoupling period because it's not supposed to be a replacement for ward housing, like I said...a compromise.

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Originally Posted by LianaThorne

To be fair, they said IS was going to not be actual housing and for expectations to be dramatically lowered on that front. Gardening would be separate, customization would be separate, etc. There wasn't going to be any decoupling period because it's not supposed to be a replacement for ward housing, like I said...a compromise.

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Obviously but that's not what the topic of this thread is. "Did Island Sanctuary satisfy any reasons you want a house?" There are several reasons why people want a house. A customizable space is one of them but the gated features is also a big driver for the interest and IS did nothing for either of those. In a certain light the IS "gardening" and workshop can be seen as a mockery of what players have been asking for for several years.

Ok, it did satisfy one thing: It's my preferred biome. But what about the people that want a different setting? Too bad for them I guess.

The root of my frustration is that decoupling outdoor gardening and workshops from housing would have been a very cheap way to ease demand. The ward system cannot keep up for the simple reason that it assumes that all worlds and DC's are populated evenly which makes it a very expensive way to increase supply. Increase it enough to meet the demands of the heavily populated worlds and you'll have empty houses on the smaller worlds. World and DC travel have limits that make commuting impractical.

I believe that Square (finally?) understands that problem so I do not think IS is a compromise solution for instanced housing.

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Originally Posted by Soosfief

Island Sanctuary was one of the features I was mostly looking forward to and it's a huge disappointment in my opinion.
Too grindy, less customization than expected. I wish I could arrange my crops and houses like furniture in my house.

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Anything that large is going to be fairly static. That's just how it goes. You would have all kinds of performance issues if you had a wide open space that you could just customize freely. Even housing districts and the cities are laid out in such a way that there's always something obstructing your full view.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

Obviously but that's not what the topic of this thread is. "Did Island Sanctuary satisfy any reasons you want a house?" There are several reasons why people want a house. A customizable space is one of them but the gated features is also a big driver for the interest and IS did nothing for either of those. In a certain light the IS "gardening" and workshop can be seen as a mockery of what players have been asking for for several years.

Ok, it did satisfy one thing: It's my preferred biome. But what about the people that want a different setting? Too bad for them I guess.

The root of my frustration is that decoupling outdoor gardening and workshops from housing would have been a very cheap way to ease demand. The ward system cannot keep up for the simple reason that it assumes that all worlds and DC's are populated evenly which makes it a very expensive way to increase supply. Increase it enough to meet the demands of the heavily populated worlds and you'll have empty houses on the smaller worlds. World and DC travel have limits that make commuting impractical.

I believe that Square (finally?) understands that problem so I do not think IS is a compromise solution for instanced housing.

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It feels kind of backwards to even ask if it satisfied housing then, if it was never meant to be a full replacement for housing/have anything to do with housing in the first place......?

I view it as their reply to the demand for instanced housing or what they view as a compromise but they flat out said: "This will not be instanced housing, have any relation to gardening with housing or be on the same level as housing as we know it, lower your expectations."

So, if we know that, why are we asking in the first place if housing demand/wants/needs is satisfied via IS?

I never wanted IS as a house replacement, and I have no idea why some people started painting it as such.

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Originally Posted by LianaThorne

It feels kind of backwards to even ask if it satisfied housing then, if it was never meant to be a full replacement for housing/have anything to do with housing in the first place......?

I view it as their reply to the demand for instanced housing or what they view as a compromise but they flat out said: "This will not be instanced housing, have any relation to gardening with housing or be on the same level as housing as we know it, lower your expectations."

So, if we know that, why are we asking in the first place if housing demand/wants/needs is satisfied via IS?

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The idea behind the thread wasn't to ask if it was a way to satisfies desire for a house, only if it satisfies some of the reasons why players say they want a house (as opposed to an apartment).

Some players ask for access to gardening but aren't always specifically stating it's because they want to grow Thavnarian Onions. Growing crops on the island is similar to how we grow in a garden patch (except we don't get to automate the garden patch tending via mammets).

Some ask for an outdoor space because they want an outdoor view, not necessarily because they want to use outdoor furnishing. This provides that.

Some just want more room to run around in privately without others intruding on their personal space.

With luck, the thread is generating ideas both for what players would like to see added to the Sanctuary and also add more detail to why players actually want a house.

The whole reason I want a house is because the game keeps giving me 2 retainers full of decorations worth yet makes housing one of the most bullshit processes to get and to keep in the game.

I've noticed most of the people I've talked to who own houses seem to like IS more than their actual houses, and end up there far more often. It's ironic, those who do not own but want houses do not seem to like IS, while people who already have houses seem to absolutely love IS.

Yes! Mostly.

I owned a house for ages specifically so I could garden, AFK outdoors, and jump around on rooftops in a place I owned while waiting for duties.

Ideally I'd be able to decorate with outdoor furniture too, and have retainers hanging around but yes this mostly checks my personal boxes.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

I've noticed most of the people I've talked to who own houses seem to like IS more than their actual houses, and end up there far more often. It's ironic, those who do not own but want houses do not seem to like IS, while people who already have houses seem to absolutely love IS.

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Probably because IS has that "New Car Smell" with cosmetics and stuff to unlock. Check back when those people have leveled up the island and got the cosmetics they want out of it.