Did Island Sanctuary satisfy any reasons you want a house?

[hynaku]

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

[Mikki]

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

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.

[Adeacia]

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.

[LaylaTsarra]

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.

[Jojoya]

So then why are people still getting the error?

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.

[LaylaTsarra]

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.

[Rueby]

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

[Solarra]

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.

[LianaThorne]

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.

[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.