After playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons for a while now, it's clear to me why there is such a "tight knit" community around Animal Crossing. The time gating features are not friendly to new players at all. Each time a vital service: Resident Services, Nook's and Cranny, and so on closes, the game becomes nearly unplayable unless you have friends who let you come to their island to perform necessary transactions. (In the case of Resident Services, that isn't even an option.)
For new players who don't have an established Animal Crossing network, these closures mean an entire day of lost progress. So far, none of my store closures have coincided with visits from other merchants who would buy goods from me. That pretty much defeats the purpose of playing at this point of the game. Right now, I need bells to continue transforming my island. To do that, I need someone to buy my goods. Without a shop or merchants, there is no reason to play the game today.
I don't want anyone to think that I don't like this game. New Horizons is the first Animal Crossing game I have ever played, and so far, it is one of the best sandbox style farming/builders I have ever played. The very few issues that I have seen with the game seem to be almost mobile style pay-to-win mechanics that are completely unnecessary in this game.
Time gating is usually used to prolong an event with the goal of coaxing the player to pay money to speed the process up. That is obviously not the case in Animal Crossing, so why do it? I think it's interesting that your Animal crossing character can contribute bells to build everything, but bells can't be contributed to speed up the construction of buildings, nor can you 'work' on the building to speed up the process.
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