Quote Originally Posted by Jason_Ashford View Post
they won't because it's an instanced location, like Bozja was.
To add to this, it's an instanced location tied specifically to the player; you cannot visit a friend's island if they are not online and in said island at the time, because it does not otherwise exist.

I admit, I'd been curious how they'd deal with the instancing. Things like inn rooms and GC barracks (and 'waiting room' areas for trials, stuff like the new zones for the MSQ, etc.) can be instanced endlessly because only you are ever present, meaning the 'instance' can take place entirely client-side; no one can visit your inn room or barracks, so they don't need to actually be 'real' in terms of how the server views them.

If you couldn't visit someone else's island sanctuary, they could do the same thing (and thus there'd be no 'due to heavy server load, you could not enter your island' errors). But the fact that they do let you visit means the island needs to be available on the server, so that you and the other person have a shared view of reality and can see each other moving around, etc.

Having it only allow you to visit islands which are already instanced -- e.g., where the island owner is online and on the island at that moment -- is an interesting way to try to artificially limit how many are in use at once. People can't just hop down a list previewing everyone's island at random (causing a lot of instances to be allocated and deallocated), etc.

It's actually rather an elegant solution, albeit one that may delay instance-related issues more than it actually really solves them.

But the teleportation system -- as noted -- does not allow you to teleport into "dynamically" instanced areas, and if they wanted to add aetherytes to the island they'd almost certainly have to rewrite a whooooole bunch of things under the hood. Including the actual "is there an instance already or do we need to create one" code that's associated with the NPCs that take you into Eureka, Bozja, or your island.

(Side note: this is also probably why you can't put a miniature aetheryte inside your house and thus teleport directly to the interior as opposed to teleporting to the yard. The wards are continuous instances -- they always exist, just like open world zones, and thus the teleportation system can target them. The interior of a house is -- like Eureka, Bozja, or your island -- spun up as an instance when needed, and subject to the same load considerations that the others are; so far as I can tell, the door to a house functions basically the same as the NPC that takes you to your island sanctuary. Hence why sometimes, if the housing servers are under heavy load, you can be prevented from entering a house or apartment/private chamber unless someone is already inside the thing you're trying to enter, thus meaning there already is an instance to join.)