Quote Originally Posted by Tehmon View Post
The timegate/big-grind wall hits you out of nowhere. The first 5-6 sanctuary levels go by smoothly, but then at 6-7 you have very little blue cowries left so you can't expand the island willy-nilly and you need rare materials to renovate your facilities, which is another timegated effort. It caught me totally off-guard. So it becomes the waiting game, or the '' go gather materials for hours and hours in a loop in one place that is the most efficient to farm, only to spend your entire day gaining one level but you aren't really rewarded with anything so why bother '' game.
they said from the get-go that island sanctuary would be slow progress and while you can power grind island exp by gathering materials out in the wild, ultimately you'd get the same result but with far less effort by doing the content as intended, which is harvesting materials from your animals and fields daily/weekly, sending out your mammet gatherers, and making products that sell for chunks of cowries and exp (more if you pay attention to the trends and make several items from the the categories in high demand).

Island Sanctuary is designed to be a long term super casual activity with little bearing on the outside world beyond glamours, mounts, etc.

This min-maxing mentality is what's going to end up burning you out on it because it wasn't built to function that way.