What island sanctuary doesn't get about games like Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley.

[Raven2014]

But that would make sense. It's why I have an issue with a few posters around these parts, though I won't name any names. They claim to support feedback, but if anything negative is said about their precious game, they are quick to tell people to shut up, be happy darnit and/or tell them to quit if they are so unhappy. It's entirely possible to like enough features of the game to stick around, but have a bone to pick with things we may find poorly implemented. It seems like none of them understand this.

Then you should question how those feedback were phrased. Like for example, I'm open to talk about religion or charity or such as long as we all gonna engage it from an objective POV, but anyone start it with the "you would commit a sin for doing/notdoing certain thing" then well ... I have a door with their faces on it.

There have been many post and suggestion on how to improve IS, and that's fine, I actually participated and contribute my own suggestion in those. But this thread ... already started out on a false premise. For example take the thread tittle itself, my first reaction to it was like ... "maybe because it's never tried to become Stardew/Animal crossing" to begin with?. And the body of the post pretty much follow the same premise.

Like imagine, someone come to you and say "you missed the opportunity to be like great person X". Your reaction come down to two things: are you actually trying to emulate person X or not.

- If you are, and had announced that it has been your goal all along, but fail to take initiative to achieve that goal ... then ok, that's a fair criticism.

- But if your goal has never been to emulate person X, and the only reason other people push this expectation or assumption on you simply because X was popular. Then they even have the audacity to say "they're disappointed" in you for failing to meet that expectation ... if you are someone in this position ... how would you feel? Oh, and as a bonus, they also gonna accuse to have low standard too because you didn't match "their" expectation.

This is less about defending IS, but about disagreeing with false expectation. I always say this, a debate/conversation hinch a lot how it's presented or framed. Even if the "core" topic is exactly the same, it can diverse into very different path based on first impression. This is why when people make speech, extra care is given to the opening statement. That's why publishers ask well know authors to pen the preface for their books.

I always say when people choose an extreme/hyperbolic/unrealistic way to frame their argument thinking it strengthen it, they made a very bad mistake.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

What the OP doesn't get about content like Island Sanctuary:

As SE stated on multiple occasions prior to its release, Island Sanctuary was never intended to be an Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. Bringing up yet another set of comparisons is pointless.

Honest question but you have a source for anyone from the team saying to not expect something similar to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley? I did a Google and couldn’t find this. All I could find was gaming news websites and their articles titled things like “FFXIV is getting a new mode inspired by animal crossing” and whatnot. Call it fake news if you want but it seems the available info at the time led them to make those conclusions. I only remember them saying it wouldn’t be a housing system and that’s all.

Even if they did explicitly say to not expect that it’s still not an excuse for the content having problems. Like if they didn’t intend to make it have a fun gameplay loop like stardew… maybe they should have because the workshop system ain’t it.

Okay, so you and others don't like it. Other players do and visit their Sanctuaries regularly.

SE doesn't expect every player to like every piece of content released in the game.

C’mon this is a weak argument and you know it… you can do better than this dawg. I actually wanted to like IS, and I actually listed the many things I currently like about it. I’m the target audience! And as I said I am still currently doing this content but I just wish it was more fun because I want it to like it even more! You can’t just say that every time someone criticizes content….

[Greyhawk]

You should take a look yourself. Acting like an opinion is invalid because you don't like it isn't mature behavior.

Ok...

I never, ever once said (or acted like) opinions were invalid, nor did I say "that's a bad idea" or anything like it.

I fought the fight of fact, not opinion. I asked you what was poorly implemented. You couldn't answer except with some emotional response and that you didn't like it. You couldn't refute anything I said and instead went on some personal tirade about how bad it hurts, then resort to some shitty personal attack.

You've completely invalidated your own argument with that hot mess.

[Jojoya]

If you feel like people shouldn't be allowed to express feedback of a feature that was a selling point of the expansion, perhaps you should be the one avoiding going into a place meant for feedback - the official forum of the game - just to tell people to ignore things.

"I don't like it" isn't especially useful as feedback, especially when the player says their reason for disliking the content was they were expecting things the player base had been told not to expect before the content was even released.

Same! I also happen to dislike FFXIV's pvp. I find it boring and the rewards aren't enough to make me stomach it. I never complained about it in the forums. However, I can and I should complain about content that I think should be better than it is

Yet you admit the content delivered what YoshiP said it would have. If you knew what he said the content would include, you should have also known that he said that the player base needed to lower their expectations because the content was not going to on the level of an Animal Crossing. All that was included in the same interview answer.

If the content hadn't delivered what we were told to expect, then complaints would have been justified.

Just about any content is going to have room for improvement. Instead of complaining that you don't like what they told us we would (and did) get, try offering ideas for what you think would make it better while staying true to what it was intended to be.

Honest question but you have a source for anyone from the team saying to not expect something similar to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley? I did a Google and couldn’t find this. All I could find was gaming news websites and their articles titled things like “FFXIV is getting a new mode inspired by animal crossing” and whatnot. Call it fake news if you want but it seems the available info at the time led them to make those conclusions. I only remember them saying it wouldn’t be a housing system and that’s all.

Even if they did explicitly say to not expect that it’s still not an excuse for the content having problems. Like if they didn’t intend to make it have a fun gameplay loop like stardew… maybe they should have because the workshop system ain’t it.

There were several comments made over a long period of time but probably the best known and most detailed was the response YoshiP made to an interview question from Shenpai during the Endwalker media tour.

The following is a transcript of the official translation:

Shenpai’s Q: “Since the announcement of Island Sanctuary there has been a lot of mystery surrounding this content, are there any new details you can share about it?”

Uh, so, I want to say firstly that when we originally announced Island Sanctuary, we were kind of taken aback by the huge response we got by the players. Uh we weren’t expecting such an incredible reaction.

So really, because now uh, we-we understood that a lot of players are really looking forward to it and they’ve got like really high expectations-- I did not want to just approach it in a haphazard way. For example if we just to give some uh information here and there uh, I think that might lead to a misunderstanding on the player’s side. They might not really understand what we are trying to do in this content. So, I thought it might be a safer option if we wait until we are at a stage where we can show screenshots or maybe even live game play, in a stream.

But I just want to give like uh, a bit of a disclaimer for our players. Uh, I think a lot in-a lot of people are thinking that maybe uh Island Sanctuary will be something very akin to Animal Crossing, uh but Animal Crossing is really the product of many, many years of you know, uh, installments, very many iterations, much development, uh so a first and foremost I’d just like to say that uh please don’t expect something on that level uh because it will be a little bit tough for us uh in the team.

But I would like to provide you some general details, just some general information. So this is going to be Island Sanctuary is new content that we’re putting in the game and we will be uh putting it in the 6.x series, and we will make sure to update the content regularly as well. So it will be uh quite a large scale uh new form of content.

And so really the concept is that you obviously have your own island. So you have at the start, kind of like a blank canvas, and so you can see “okay what type of building do I want to place here? What type of materials do I want to gather?” and you know, you can see “okay Maybe I want to let my minions roam free in this uh, in this Island.” So that was really the concept we were going for. This is not going to be a, the type of content where people compete with each other and you won’t feel pressurized like for example if someone is trying to uh get Allagan Tomestones, you know, they feel like, “oh I have to do that content every week”, uh, so it’s really free from those pressures and laid back, relaxed, uh where basically you have your own sanctuary, uh your island.


So this is not the type of content where you would expect to find that you know, the goal is to get like a super strong weapon or you know for the people who like raiding then maybe this is not so much their cup of tea, maybe they will not play it.

So really I’d like for people to think of it that in 14 uh, this is an area where you can uh, relax. So basically you- you can also call over your friends to your island, have a chat with them, you can visit your friends’ island, but basically it’s laid back, relaxed content. So it’s Typically things like tending to crops or you know like uh looking after animals, raising animals, that was the uh more of the concept we were going with here.

So, of course there is content which is the, there’s a focus on the house, the garden, and the furniture. But this, I would say, Island sanctuary, you could see like a bit of a rank higher, because there’s, there’s a bit more uh broad things in there, in the mix.

But I think that’s probably about all that I can share for today.

Shenpai: “That’s more than I thought, thank you so much!”

C’mon this is a weak argument and you know it… you can do better than this dawg. I actually wanted to like IS, and I actually listed the many things I currently like about it. I’m the target audience! And as I said I am still currently doing this content but I just wish it was more fun because I want it to like it even more! You can’t just say that every time someone criticizes content….

In what way is it a weak argument? It is impossible for any game developer to make everyone happy with every piece of content they release.

It's okay to realize that you don't like something that you were hoping you would like. In your case, it seems like you set your expectations far too high because you were lacking information that was released in advance of the content release.

They're not going to go back and remake Island Sanctuary into a Stardew Valley because that was never their intent for the content.

Ater reading through the transcript, are you still certain you were the target audience for the content?

[Nanne]

I only hoped that the farming and buildings would have worked similarly to Harvest Moon/Stardew but maybe future updates improve the Island

[DixieBellOCE]

To sum up what Island Sanctuary is missing.

FUN

[Voltyblast]

The weird thing of all this? You can get Stardew Valley for the price of one month of subscription. And less time gating.

[MsQi]

IS = Island Sweatshop

[Ardeth]

The xp was terrible. Baby's first stock market simulator wasn't interesting. The island itself is very bland. You can barely customize it. Rare animals is a stupid system simply because it's tied to two variables. So it's never up because one of the values isn't true.

I've never played any of the island simulators other than Animal Crossing and this isn't remotely Animal Crossing.

I just didn't like it. I did it for my Croc mount and abandoned it.

[Alleo]

It is fair, because the amount of content is basically the same as some single player games, just re-ordered in such a way to be a vertical grind with 0 imagination.

Why is it that people can only comprehend that the content needs to be non-repeatable, OR so repeatable that you feel the urge to login every single minute of every single day to survive as a human being? Is the MMO brain so rotten, that you can't even understand how a video game can be a comfortable, leisure activity, with repeatable aspects to it? The thing we've seen in a lot of other video games in our history? Is it being an MMO mean it needs to be blood sucking or dull?

I don't even really care about the decoration portion of it. It's just.. Not good repeatable content with how they've designed the verticality of it and the turn-ins for a grind. They literally min-maxed it before giving it to us is the problem.

It's just another system with force-feed verticality. They literally do not understand how to make horizontal, repeatable gameplay. Because the only thing they can think about is "How can we waste their time and put in Materia as a reward?"

So what would you have done to make it content that gives horizontal repeatable gameplay without it being a huge grind? Especially since you dont care about the decoration portion? What is there to grind for over a longer time without it feeling necessary to be there daily to get something out of it?

Just curious to know.