Island Sanctuary is being discontinued?

[GoatOfWar]

I sincerely hope so, they're putting valuable developer resources into spreadsheet island that could be reallocated to actual content.

[SomeGuy22]

"What a waste of resources. They should stop."
"You know what? You're right. Didn't pan out. We'll stop that now."
"First of all, how dare you."

The people who are upset the devs are stopping IS support are not the same who wanted them to stop IS support.

[VictorSpoils]

The people who are upset the devs are stopping IS support are not the same who wanted them to stop IS support.

First of all, how dare you

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I am convinced that the number of players who stay subbed just because of a useless pixel house is a small minority and it is immaterial when it comes to revenue. Definitely not the “cash cow” some people want to make believe

It really isn't, as much as people like to fantasize about it being so.

With 9000 plots per world with 80-ish servers across all regions, that's about 720,000 ish plots. At $15/sub, that's about 10.8mil/month off of forced subs
That figure however, is under the assumptions that:

- all plots are bought on every world (spoiler: no, Dynamis alone nullifies that)
- Every single plot is owned by a unique player that would require a sub to keep from demolishing (when players own multiple plots, or own a plot + FC house)
- Assumes every player under that umbrella is paying the full sub price, not entry or legacy discounted ones.
- Every plot owner is being forced to pay for the house and not just paying for the sub because they're playing the game at that time anyway.

In reality, the amount of money they'd make from forced subs is so small in the grand scheme that the idea of them purposefully doing it is ludicrous. The mogstation likely generates magnitudes more money than the forced subs ever would. In fact, they'd likely get more money by creating an instanced housing system, advertising it and getting tons of players to become excited, come back to the game/play it more often and thus having more oppportunities for them to buy something from the mogstation than the forced sub model ever could.

But as the beginning of EW & when IS launched have shown when so many housing-server related instances were open that prevented so many from being able to get into their house/IS instance, the lack of an instanced house system is 100% a technical problem - they literally don't have the ability to support it at this point in time. Putting it into the game until they solve the underlying issue (lack of server power) would be the most stupidest thing they could do, since it'd just cause more problems from constantly getting locked out of your house due to lack of instances and rendering the housing system unusable during any sort of prime-time hour range.

Hopefully, the cloud data test provided them with some good results, since hosting housing related stuff on the cloud would arguably be a very good solution for them due to dynamic scalability.

[Jojoya]

But as the beginning of EW & when IS launched have shown when so many housing-server related instances were open that prevented so many from being able to get into their house/IS instance, the lack of an instanced house system is 100% a technical problem - they literally don't have the ability to support it at this point in time. Putting it into the game until they solve the underlying issue (lack of server power) would be the most stupidest thing they could do, since it'd just cause more problems from constantly getting locked out of your house due to lack of instances and rendering the housing system unusable during any sort of prime-time hour range.

If the server limitations were that severe a problem, we still wouldn't be able to get into the wards or Island Sanctuary.

You're talking withholding potential content from players due to a very temporary congestion problem caused by an unusually high volume of players at content released. Might as well shut down the game every time a log in queue exceeds 100 players in that case.

Instanced housing would not have long term congestion problems as you imply. If that were true we'd already having those problems every single day, especially on servers like Balmung where housing is a lot more important to players and use is more frequent.

[RaideDuku]

For me, it's more like they used up all that time and resources to make it and now it's getting just dumped without them trying to make it "better". (ㆆ _ ㆆ)
Iscah's pointing out that the devs don't do multi-expansion spanning content is also something that adds to it too.

Keep putting resources into something in the hopes it'll be good eventually?

That's how you get Diadem. No one wants another Diadem.

[Shougun]

Keep putting resources into something in the hopes it'll be good eventually?

That's how you get Diadem. No one wants another Diadem.

Alternatively, never put resources into things that could be good or even great and just keep making and throwing stuff at the wall hoping something sticks.

Many great things have a history of originally being bad.. I don't think there is anything inherent in Island Sanctuary that disallows improvements except SE's own choices (for example they follow something akin to what you said, which is not to improve the past and just add to the top and hope... I enjoy the content but I do feel they need to stop building at the top of the tower and add more bases to create a 'stronghold' of content. Like gathering and catching monsters could be gameified). Instead they have only solidified the charts and tables side of things by stacking on stacks.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

If the server limitations were that severe a problem, we still wouldn't be able to get into the wards or Island Sanctuary.

You're talking withholding potential content from players due to a very temporary congestion problem caused by an unusually high volume of players at content released. Might as well shut down the game every time a log in queue exceeds 100 players in that case.

Instanced housing would not have long term congestion problems as you imply. If that were true we'd already having those problems every single day, especially on servers like Balmung where housing is a lot more important to players and use is more frequent.

The problem is that the current average playerbase is down due to current downtime, on top of being restricted on who gets it. This creates a very low average Server I/O load on resources, and by the very fact it's restricted to a theoretical finite cap even in the worst case, it can be handled accordingly - this is also the extremely likely reason they're intensely stingy on simply adding more wards, as you have to understand how much additional average Server I/O load you're going to be adding and make sure your system can handle it.

Made even more doubly so by the fact that by nature of them being more unattractive options, Apartments on any given day will contribute very little to the expected load, to the point they're a nothing burger in general load balancing.

Tear open the gates to full instanced housing, and the server I/O on the content on any given day will shoot into the stratosphere compared to what it is now. Considering that the instance limit for housing was hit extremely easy for huge swathes of the day (during the first 2 weeks ish I could only get into my home during what was practically work hours, and good luck on weekends outside dead hours) during EW's launch, and then again easily hit almost immediately by every server when IS launched, it's pretty apparent the instance cap is on the low end. Even post initial launch and hype, I have no doubts the system would fall apart quickly and suffer from problems on the daily.

Having worked with server systems for several AAA games, I can pretty much guarantee you it's a server power - if they were profit driven, they would have implemented Instance Housing long ago due to it creating more player retention, thus more potentiality to mogstation purchases/mogstation interaction where their real profit margins lie. Even more especially when Square Enix & Yoshi-P have themselves have constantly alluded to lack of server equipment constantly throughout the years due to how vicious the microchip shortage has been on acquiring server hardware in the industry in general (one of my previous workmates at Ubisoft loves to tell me they're still waiting on hardware orders from 2021) - it's extremely obvious to my own dev experience they have a system that simply cannot scale, and the current ward additions are basically as much as they can do for the time being with the resources they have.

There's also the simple fact that they currently have 4 regions, and enough server equipment has to be bought, installed, and of sufficient quality to actually handle the solution. They could acquire all the tech they need to implement Instanced Housing on NA, but it'd be irrelevant - unless they can implement the solution in all regions simultaneously, there will be massive complaints.

Every sign both on a technical level mindset and a business mindset point to there being a technical chokehold, nothing out of malice, ignorance or the like. It also explains their sudden interest in cloud data technologies when there's old Shadowbringers era interviews saying they had little interest in it - not even just for housing, but plenty of other systems that have gotten chokeholded in recent expansions (solo instances, The lobby server, etc) can benefit immensely from cloud server providing dynamic scalability without the need to proccure that scarce, expensive hardware.

[Jojoya]

Tear open the gates to full instanced housing, and the server I/O on the content on any given day will shoot into the stratosphere compared to what it is now.

This is where I disagree with you.

The problem with access to housing at the start of Endwalker happened on a single data center for less than a day. We didn't suddenly have half the player base up and disappear the following day for the rest of the expansion.

The problem with access to Island Sanctuary did last for 2 weeks - but that was two weeks where everyone was focused on getting their Islands ranked up and needed to spend more time manually gatherings because the granaries couldn't keep up with most of the base need like they can now. Again, it wasn't a large chunk of the player base disappearing that removed the congestion. It was players going back to their normal game routines.

The same thing would happen with instanced housing. Housing is not the game play the majority of players want to spend their time on. They want to spend their time doing MSQ, leveling alt jobs, running through raids and other content. There would once again be a short period of congestion like we had with Island Sanctuary then it would disappear.

If players were going to prefer hanging out in their houses when not doing content, it would already be happening but it is not. The majority of wards are ghost towns. Players prefer hanging out in one of the cities where they can see and will be seen by other players, where they can chat with others without being restricted by the 64/128 linkshell limits.

I know people are fearing another Warlords of Draenor where players do nothing but sit in their garrisons while waiting for their raid queue to pop but the conditions that caused garrison camping during that expansion do not exist in this game for the majority of players. They want to be playing the game and there are plenty of options for players to choose from outside of their housing even while waiting in queue. WoD did not have those options and so players sat in their garrisons.

[hynaku]

Only Yoshi knows if it be discontinued. In 7.0 they could rework it into instance housing.