patch 7.2 or next expansion

[Daralii]

Island Sanctuary

Where do I even begin? Yoshida, in a rare example of terrible PR, widely overhyped what this was supposed to be. He outright stated the dev team was inspired by Animal Crossing, a statement that needed to be walked back several times due to how ridiculously misleading it was. It's truly baffling what they were trying to accomplish here. Who asked for what essentially began a glorified retainer venture? The devs kept insisting this was lifestyle content despite it having less depth than Farmville, a facebook mobile game that released in 2009. Even basic functions you'd expect from lifestyle content is absent. What you feed your animals doesn't matter, nothing you build has any real impact on the "farm" itself, tending to things like crops amounts to clicking on them once a day. Mentioning Island Sanctuary in even the same breath as Animal Crossing is, frankly, absurd.

Nobody, and I do mean nobody wanted anything remotely like what Island Sanctuary ended up being. Even those who did wind up enjoying it to some extent. Complaints were rampant because they didn't listen to a single thing people wanted from this sort of content. A piece of content so shallow they deliberately had to neuter their own gathering system just to give it some form of artificial longevity.

Don't forget that Yoshida's main takeaway from the Island Sanctuary feedback was that they "couldn't win" when trying to be "inventive" with non-raid content, so they were just going to stop.

[BigCheez]

Don't forget that Yoshida's main takeaway from the Island Sanctuary feedback was that they "couldn't win" when trying to be "inventive" with non-raid content, so they were just going to stop.

Do you have a source for this?

If they legitimately designed spreadsheet sanctuary and their main takeaway from the poor reception to it was that they just can't win, that would be slightly troubling.