Did Island Sanctuary satisfy any reasons you want a house?

[Lustre]

One thing I will say, i hit rank 9 and built my final building (of course, a lighthouse on the hill) and the island still doesn't feel like its mine. I think even surface level cosmetic customisation would go a long way to alleviating this.

[WellGramarye]

One thing I will say, i hit rank 9 and built my final building (of course, a lighthouse on the hill) and the island still doesn't feel like its mine. I think even surface level cosmetic customisation would go a long way to alleviating this.

Its not your island. Its Tataru's. You just work there and manage it for her monetary empire.

[Kranel_San]

First, I'll repeat what has been said over and over: Island Sanctuary is not a replacement/substitute for housing.

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.).

With that in mind, we've had a week now to explore Island Sanctuary to see what we can do with it. 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?

It definitely satisfied my need of having an island, a bathhouse island, and a village of hard-working mammets which I didn't know I wanted until I saw it.

[Mimilu]

It definitely satisfied my need of having an island, a bathhouse island, and a village of hard-working mammets which I didn't know I wanted until I saw it.

Between this and Ameliance's questline, it made me want a Puppetmaster job even more (that isn't limited). ｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡

[Packetdancer]

False equivalence. That's an oversight and a lack of test coverage.

Moreover, I would make a solid bet it's an unintended consequence of all the cross-world changes they introduced to support datacenter travel. Many, many devs are terrible about re-testing every other part of a system not directly tied to something new but which might be affected by it nonetheless; comprehensive regression testing is incredibly time-consuming compared to just basic "does the new thing work when we try obviously-related A, B, and C?" smoke testing. This is not unique to SQEX. Heck, it's not even remotely unique to game development.

As for why they bundled Island Sanctuary onto the housing servers, I half-wonder if the various instance servers allocate resources in different ways and if Island Sanctuary is not fundamentally the same type of instance as housing interiors (on some lower level). On a wild guess, it might be that dungeons/raid/trials have no persisted state; when you leave a dungeon, the game does not need to remember which chests you opened or skipped. When you go into the same dungeon again later, it's completely fresh. As such, it does not need any sort of channel to communicate with any sort of persistent storage; the only things that remain from the instance are things that were put into your inventory (which is almost certainly handled by an entirely separate system).

Conversely, housing instances need to load state from persistent storage, and when they're torn down they need to have saved any changed state back into that storage... and while Island Sanctuary has a lot less state to persist, it still does need to persist it.

And if "obtain new dedicated hardware" is not a viable path -- which, let's be fair, it's generally not at present, due to General Real-World Stuff -- it may have been easier to put island sanctuary onto instance servers already set up to handle the appropriate sort of instancing (e.g. instances with persistent state), rather than trying to re-engineer other instance servers to be able to host the appropriate instance type.

(Which doesn't change the fact that it makes me wince to see.)

[Alaray]

not really because i can't use furniture items/decorate an interior of a home that ideally would have walls

only reason i dont go for a house atm is because you're basically required to stay subscribed to keep it and, sometimes, i don't feel like playing for a month and 15 a mo for fantasy house rent is kinda stupid to pay in those periods.

[HollowedDoll]

No, not at all.. I knew this had nothing to do with housing yet it has several shortcomings for me.
Since I feel like this is going to be unpopular and complainy try to read everything with a healthy dose of IMO

First of all, they told us this: "Island Sanctuary for those adventurers seeking a taste of the slow life."
So I'm thinking okay, chill retirement content, and yet here I am essentially doing unpaid labor for Tataru /s. Still, there is nothing chill about needing 50 diff materials and having to set up each and every day of the week in my workshops that run on a real 24h timer, a clock constantly ticking down is the opposite of slow for me.

The entire thing is heavily time gated because of cowries, and there isn't really much to do aside from just grabbing the rewards you want.
Green currency has not much of a point to existing right now.

Another issue is there is really nowhere that is actually cozy, every landmark I've unlocked so far is filled with Mammets who ruin the atmosphere of even the locations that are nice, it doesn't feel like my island.

I really don't have a say in anything that happens there aside from having a slight variation in landmarks and their placement, plus being able to glamour the diff level of buildings. Inviting people to your Island is kind of pointless, everyone's looks the same and there is literally not one activity you could do together.

[Deveryn]

Riddle me this: For the love of little faery apples why did they put IS on the housing servers of all places? It's not like those servers had any spare capacity.

If IS was truly meant to be standalone why weren't they partitioned into their own cluster? I would like to think that Square's devops folks aren't that naive. Kinda beggars belief when you consider that XIV is reasonably stable compared to broader industry standards (which puts them head and shoulders above most of the gamesdev niche).

Given what happened with the residential servers, I have a theory:

In discussions about instanced housing, I would state that they can't just switch over without impacting those homeowners somehow. If it weren't for the outdoor space where you do gardening, they could easily drop wards.

While it's not housing as we know it, I think IS was meant as a compromise of sorts that could potentially please those that simply wanted the place to take a break from everything. Let's be honest. Not everyone that owns a house even bothers to decorate it much. This checks off enough boxes for people and the activities are a bonus as well. (Between IS, my FC and two apartments, I'm satisfied. I might still try a housing lottery if something pops, but I'm not going to be upset if I never get something.)

I believe when they expanded the ward count last year, they accounted for the space to run IS. They definitely plan ahead as much as possible and likely have a lot of interesting things lined up for future updates.

[Vahlnir]

That's an oversight and a lack of test coverage.

This was 6.1 in a nutshell. So yeah.

[Chasingstars]

I already own a house, but I never had enough gardening, so it satifisfied what I wanted. Plus the taking care of and feeding animals, having the mammets arounds, that its set on a chill tropical island, among other things are all pluses to me.

I went into islands with extremely low expectations, and was still somehow disappointed. It's completely soulless with even less depth than wow's garrisons. That alone is impressive. I mean ffs even the orchestrion is just the functionality of the one in the inn. It's like they went out of their way to make it as barebones as possible.

Dear god no, Garrisons were an overpromised mistake.

Instead of getting capital cities in Warlrods of Draenor, like ya know what we have in Endwalker as the equvialent in FFXIV with Old Sharalyan or Radz-at-han, everyone just sat in their Garrisons. As those capital city features had to be scrapped in Warlords of Draenor for the sake of the Garrisons being a thing at launch. Imagine scrapping Radz-at-han or Old Sharalyan to make Island Sanctuaries be a thing at launch. Imagine.

Oh, and since everything was just inside your garrison like the mailbox or the auction house or whatever else, everyone felt trapped in their garrisons for the longest time.

One of the main features of garrisons that were promised was "You could set it in any of the leveling zones". Instead of, you know, the 1 spot for horde faction in Frostfire Ridge or the 1 spot for the alliance faction in Shadowmoon Valley.

Or hey remember the fact that they weren't joking when Garrisons, which were meant to be their equivalent of personal housing, was going to cost everyone a raid tier? They weren't joking. Imagine losing the first alliance raid tier because of Island Sanctuaries.