No more Island Sanctuary

[Jojoya]

This is the worst side content to date since Stormblood. It is boring and shallow. Very disappointed that they intend to make more of this in 7.0.

You may not enjoy it but enough other players are that they wish to continue with this "lifestyle content".

Rather than trying to stop SE from making content for other players just because you don't like it, try letting them know what content you'd like to see in addition to it that you would do.

[Amnmaat]

Retainer island is an insult to game design. 1 man created those farming games and had more depth than a multibillion dollar company.

[Rolder50]

Depends if they intent to actually develop on it, rather than just copying and pasting. A lot of systems in this game have gone through several iterations before they've managed to create something even remotely substantial.

If I had my way with it, I would continue it, but I would give people option to craft their own items for submission to earn Cowries, rather than gating the majority of it behind the workshop and weekly challenge log. I would also include treasure hunts, both for solo and grouped with additional rewards, and include an exclusive sightseeing log for it. Just to name a few examples.

It's not a bad foundation, but it could have been so much more and still has the potential to be such, IMO.

This is CBU3 we're talking about here. They don't know how to build on foundations.

[Winterfang]

Similar to the end goal of the Firmament Restoration was for a new housing district, The IS end goal should be a personal house.
But one of the major flaws is that the IS has been an unengaging spreadsheet that, with the exception of the first week of release to set things up, requires nothing more than a brief weekly visit. It's set it then forget it until next week and You can even go longer without visiting by setting up two weeks worth of orders from the Mammet Sweatshop since you'll still end up at the same place compared to someone who visits their Island multiple times a week for the sake of optimization and getting the rewards as fast as possible.

Should the IS end with an update to give us a personal House? Yes.
Will they actually do it? Who knows
Are there other, smaller updates they could do in the mean time to make the Tataru's Gil Prin...I mean our Personal Haven more appealing until that possibility actually happens? Absolutely
But without something huge to top off the Island after so much dev resources went into an Island that has little to no engagement, it's going to feel like a waste.

[MsQi]

Island Sanctuary is just WoW Garrisons.

You have the resource nodes once a day in the form of the Granary and Pasture, you have the slower resource production in the form of your garden plots, you have the Garrison mission board in the form of the Workshop, you have some pre-fabricated buildings you can put down (there are just even less options than the Garrison had) and you have the nonexistent social interactions.

There are a lot of similarities, but Garrisons were tired to the main story. They also made two gathering professions useless for the expansion. They are also used by the anti-housing faction of the playerbase as "evidence" that housing is bad for the community.

As limited as it is, the Island Sweatshop is a hundred times more customizable than Garrisons.

That said it really fails as a "sanctuary". It's pretty clear that was Tataru's idea. It's a business.

[Iscah]

Similar to the end goal of the Firmament Restoration was for a new housing district, The IS end goal should be a personal house.

The setup for Island Sanctuary is far too uncomfortable for that to become my private house. You arrive at a pretty wild island, rip up all the wilderness and turn it into a town of clanking factories with obnoxious mammets in every facility, and then that becomes your sole option for a house location after you've made it an unpleasant place to live? Thanks but no thanks.

[Musashidon]

i will say i dont mind island sanctuary i at least liked it more in the beginning but like most repetitive content it gets old fast.

my two complaints are rewards and the fact its alittle underwhelming.

1: rewards: they really need to stop with the whole you and only you can get this stuff from this content and allow us to market board a lot more stuff its the biggest thing that makes content repeatable cause if the only thing i have left to do once i get rank 16 and buy the new mounts/minions/music sheets is repeat the content for funsies there isn't much reason to touch look or care about it anymore.

2: underwhelming: i will cover everything else here atm the best thing added and only recently was the furnishing your island thats great cool but no all the down sides.
why cant i gather at my friends island? is it cause the mats and everything is directly connected to the persons island and thats how its all done? it seems to be and thats well boring i cant play with my friends in the content cause there is no reason at all to join your friends islands besides talking and walking around you cant guest them/tenant you cant do anything in other peoples so the multiplayer part is non existant basically.

your animals and plants can all be automated which is cool but then literally takes out a 1/2 the content to do basically even if its only a couple minutes a day so whats left running around to gather for 10 exp each or when you are capped nothing just get max amount and changed out for a new currency so you can trade for a very cheap materia which isnt worth anything and basically a worse way to farm materia.

the workshop is pretty meh you can basically lazy automate it with a predone week and just come back to restock on mats when needed or you can do it the better way and look every week and pre set it to get more optimized rewards but once again once you get everything you are doing it just to do it or for the 500k cowrie achievement but once again you will get that over time as more updates are given anyways.

once more on the animals catching them is very annoying as the rng for it can be pretty bad and its not like there is any real mechanic to it over all its just wait for the right weather and time and show up and hope you nab it, the exp isnt even great so its not even worth catching and releasing to do something different.

i feel they need to add something bigger to the content that allows it to be more interactive in a fun way that's not just either just up daily for animals/farm/workshop to lvl /farm currency.

i will say the content to me isnt terrible it just ended up super underwhelming.

suggestion to add to the content.

i think they could add ways for islands to interact with each other to make there be more reason to do things like a board for showing off your island that you can do other things with like a small weekly competition that gives small silly stuff for just participating but you can decorate your island and you use the in game like gpose system to take glamour shots and put it up there for everyone to share.

i feel i have other ideas and thoughts but most only add to the problem which is show up daily and do something and i feel it should be more like show up when you what or hang out and do this as you please and not do this daily or miss out over time.

[Theodric]

In theory, it's the sort of content I'd ordinarily enjoy if it were possessed of more depth. Yet as it stands, there's just so little to actually engage with. Once again we're stuck navigating menus and waiting around for something to happen or just mindlessly clicking on nodes in order to acquire materials. I was initially quite impressed with the size of the zone but only a portion of it can even be meaningfully altered to one's liking - and even then, you can't dismiss the mammets that cling to everything like barnacles on a fishing pier.

[Mostly_Raxus]

the hype was all because they never dismissed the lie that it was instanced housing, but instead it was 2 hours of grind to never go back, total waste.

[Khryseis_Astra]

The setup for Island Sanctuary is far too uncomfortable for that to become my private house. You arrive at a pretty wild island, rip up all the wilderness and turn it into a town of clanking factories with obnoxious mammets in every facility, and then that becomes your sole option for a house location after you've made it an unpleasant place to live? Thanks but no thanks.

Same here… although there is a rather large island just off the coast that would be perfect! I wrote a post about it in the housing forum, as a possible location for island-connected instanced housing. No one wants to live with the mammets, and I’m sure most people don’t want their actual house facing a workshop! (In fact, most of the landmark spots could use a rotation feature to aim them at a better direction to get the best views…) And I would definitely like there to be different themes you can choose, because as nice as it is to visit the cozy cabin in the tropics, I wouldn’t want my actual house to be tropical.

Any instanced system should also, bare minimum, give the same basic features of a ward house. But it’s entirely possible that there will be extra things that can only be done in instanced, just because it’s instanced. Just look at the most recent cozy cabin: open-air balconies, see-through glass on the roof, 70 more outdoor furnishings than a small plot. If I could transplant that “cabin” literally anywhere else and decorate the inside as well as the outside, and dye the roof, it’d be almost perfect! There’s so much potential to make something really great here, and I really hope they do. I like to hope they’re using IS as a testing ground for instanced, and that if they do it, it won’t necessarily be bound to the island. But if it is, so be it. At least everyone who gets through Endwalker could have a house no matter how full the wards are on their servers.