Quote Originally Posted by Eraden View Post
The key point here is that it will be some form of gardening. Whether or not it is exactly the same as what is done with house plots is not the focus here. It IS a form of gardening that allows those who do not have houses, to be able to participate in. I strongly suspect that the time and effort that they have spent and will spend on Island Sanctuaries, pales in comparison to what is required to overhaul the housing system. In addition, the developers apparently have already made it clear that instanced housing is off the table. Thus it actually DOES make sense that Island Sanctuaries are an attempt to satisfy at least part of the player base without having to invest the substantial resources required to massively increase the amount of housing that is available.
I think you're ignoring why players keep asking for access to gardening. It's not because they want "some form of gardening" to do. That's already available via flowerpots in FC rooms and apartments. Any seed you can buy from the MB or a vendor can be grown in flowerpots (which is more than you can say for garden patches - you can't grow the decorative flower seeds in those).

It's because they feel the prices for things like Thavnairian Onions are too high so they want to be able to cross breed to get the seeds and then grow the onions themselves. "Some form of gardening" in Island Sanctuary isn't going to provide that.

It's also clear that instanced housing is not off the table when they gave us apartments in the first place. Apartments are instanced housing. It exists in the game. The question is whether SE is willing to expand on it so it provides more of what makes house ownership more attractive than apartment ownership.

Island Sanctuary was not being developed to satisfy housing demand. It was developed to satisfy other requests coming from the player base (primarily the JP side) for things like being able to have more than one minion out at a time. I don't envy SE the rage they're going to have to face when specific details about Island Sanctuary get released and players found out they've been misled by other players like you that insist it's to satisfy housing complaints.