Translating the article from marketing-speak to English:
Housing underperformed in December (public and guild neighbourhoods stand abandoned), so Blizzard is taking action
- introduce a fomo grind (endeavours ) ASAP next week
- to force people, who bought preorder previously , set up their house and then abandoned it, to go back into their neighborhoods
- to force people, who didnât buy preorder, to buy the preorder and send them into the neighborhoods
- give a top brass PR interview to PC gamer and promise
- to increase house level every patch
- to provide new decor every patch
So in other words
Housing was made without utility and any gameplay whatsoever, allegedly so it doesnât feel as a chore and people arenât forced to spend time in neighbourhoods/house allegedly.
Which lead to people not spending time in the neighborhoods/house in december.
Which led to blizzard panicking.
Which led to Blizzard giving panic interview and introducing fomo chores ASAP, to force people to go to neighborhoods, and to promise us a similar grind will be introduced every patch.
So now we have no utility/no gameplay, AND we have chores forcing us to go to the neighborhood
Wait and observe people come in and explain, how having a crafting table or a flower patch in your house is bad and is a chore, but having to grind your house level every patch by doing endeavours is good and optional
Nice! Looking forward to it. Iâve seen amazing creations already.
Mr GM did a nice breakdown of the article:-
So there was just a huge interview all about Player Housing in WoW by @pcgamer and we learned a lot of new info about whatâs coming next, and whatâs planned for Housing long-term.
- Neighborhood Endeavours (Midnight Pre-Patch)
- Lots more decor coming (into the 1000s)
- Housing roadmap planned âcloser to launchâ
- More Renown levels over time (extra XP will carry over)
- Guild halls planned (likely not pre-patch)
- Decor drops from raids + personal loot + bad luck protection
- Exterior âroomsâ / daylight spaces
- New home exteriors incl. Blood Elf + Night Elf
- Bigger âmediumâ homes coming
- More visible plot boundaries
- Interactive decor (books/drinks etc)
- Co-decorating + possible co-ownership
- Import/export & sharing builds planned
- Higher exterior budgets + exterior lighting later
- Mounts/pets roaming your house planned
yep, u can place a decor cup, click on it and your character will hold the cup in their hand, posing for a screenshot, or maybe potentially even do the drink animation
similar to when you do the âpose for paintingâ job in the undermine
or u can place a scroll and ur character will do the animation of reading it
similar to how people can observe you open your map menu
i hope, everyone is excited for this
but u have written out a long list of what comes down to two things: decorative tools QOLs and more decorative grinds (house levels/furniture), so you wrote out all the decorative features
but idk if u mentioned what seems to be the only 2 gameplay feature promised.
the first gameplay feature promised and thus the biggest feature promised seems to be a community theater
where you can come and observe rp players roleplay
kindof like stormwind but maybe with tickets
and the second gameplay feature promised is a race track inside the neighborhood kind of like dragonflying world quest has several tracks in every zone after DF. we might get a track like that in the neighborhood, as per the article
those are two biggest things, letâs not forget about them
To be frank, you wonât need to, unless you want a Versailles-style palace.
I do hope those are decor items related to that raid, and not home essentials. âRaid or dieâ has never been well received by people who arenât interested in raiding.
I hope I will be able to choose which pet. I want my to dog pet roam around the home, but not a crocodile or a demon.
I would guess it will pick from your favourite pets or let all of them loose the same way the garrison does.
I hope so to but we could in our garrisons so I expect the same here.
I donât mind the raid drops. We can farm old content and LFR is always an option for current content. So far not a huge number of items come from raids or dungeons. As a non pvper it will take me ages to get those items.
It sounds really promising. Iâm glad its being treated as a proper evergreen feature.
While some aspects dont appeal to me, like guild halls, I think its great that they have taken those requests on board.
its not that i disagree with you, but allow me to go into some details here
The thing is, Blizzard are not just going to lock room number behind the house level, they will also lock room types and furniture behind the house level.
So for example if there is something like a unique darnassus-ambience room or an open manaforge-like room or a closed ball-shaped room, that is likely to be closed behind grinding up a certain house level.
And knowing how blizzard treats gear acquisitions, i suppose it makes sense to expect dailies or weeklies, that drip-feed you this house level progress, then catch up phases, then scaling down etc.
I generally speaking agree with your premise, that after some amount of house levels people, who are doing housing and thus are susceptible to this treadmill, will loose interest in gaining further house levels.
Same as a lot of people right now gain a certain equipment ilvl, and then drop the gearing process
Same as pre-squishing a lot of people gained a certain character level, and then dropped the levelling process like ânah, 110 is too many levels for meâ
But Blizzardâs hope like with all other things they do these days, is that the house level treadmill will hold at least temporarily. Ideally for the duration of midnight. if not that, at least for the season. If not for the season, at least for the prepatch, so they can sell preorders to whomever they can.
So its not that i disagree with you
Its that i think Blizzard are blizzarding by trying to solve lack of interaction with housing TEMPORARILY by introducing a fomo treadmill grind instead of solving the key issue LONG-TERM: that there is no gameplay inside the house, so you build the house once, and then have nothing to do after that
A common developer would add some minigames to the house, or add some utilities to the house like a portal room, a crafting table, a herb garden - whatever
But what blizzard does is they ignore the underlying issue, and just apply a fomo grind on top of that, that will produce a temporary result.
This contradicts the narrative of âmidnight housing is chore-freeâ, because according to the article house levelling is going to essentially function the way gear functions: a new grind every patch that you carry out by doing chores.
However, the gear facilitates almost all playstyles: questing, delving, farming, etc.
But grinding the house level doesnt facilitate any game activity outside of designing your house.
So essentially midnight housing has a housing-specific chore/grind, that empowers you in housing, but nowhere else.
However, to do that house level grind (endeavours) efficiently, gear helps a lot.
So now if you are a housing enthusiast, you have to do both gear grind and house level grind. Not to mention all the furniture, that is locked behind mythic and raids.
So the narrative of âhousing is chore-freeâ proves to be (how shall i put it politely?) ⊠inaccurate?
Housing is not chore-free, its double chore.
You have to do your house level grind, which is in no way connected to housing its pve essentially, AND you have to do your usual pve grind (getting ilvl, getting mythic/raid locked items etc)
So midnight housing is not shaping up chore-free, its shaping up chore-heavy
and the chores have nothing to do with the housing itself
So this is actually worse than when we made PVPers do PVE.
At least PVPers could do SOME gear progressions via PVP, even if the other part of gear progression was locked behind PVE
House enthusiasts can do 0 house progression through housing itself, its all through PVE chores
So who is actually the housing systems is designed for and by whom?
Food for thought
Yep, as per article, it seems to be evergreen in exactly the way i warned its going to be
essentially blizzard spamming new grinds, almost the same as we have to grind equipment ilvl, but we grind house levels instead. hlvl lol
these grinds are very cheap to manufacture: you just up the room number, add a new skybox room and do a new endeavor, tied to the new dungeon
Also add new furniture items most of them you can do by just reskinning existing game assets
Then you drip-feed that to players for weekly quests/pve chores
The production for this is cheap, so Blizzard might keep this up for some time, especially if the whales come through and spend lavishly in the shop
Big plans for wow housing indeed
Iâm either slightly insane (Possibly true) but I really am looking forward to all the new housing decor. I donât mind grinding as I learned from my garrison stick on some kewl beans music, relax and grind! As my nan always said âGood things come to those who waitâ and itâs true.
The only down side I have encountered (especially today in West Fall) Iâm doing the same quests as people levelling up and feel sorry for them. Time and time again level 80âs were running in and obviously one shotting a large area. The poor levellers stand waiting for respawns and boom another high level demolishes the place. If you see a lowbie, round up the needed mobs and let the leveller hit them so they count for them and you still get your quests done.
Apart from that let the fun begin!
I need a cat like Fiona on my Home couch!
Snowie <3
Youâre not insane. Plenty of us feel the same. I may even restart my home again to accommodate the new items. Or maybe the increase in rooms will be enough.
It is unfortunate when we need to do things where lowbies are trying to level although in some cases ive done a new character to get some items. I have also found it hard to find mobs at times for some things because they are just one shot constantly.
those were the days
Donât wait to strike until the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking
Would be interesting to know if this includes crafting decor too. I bet they made good money from tokens. I totally bet that, something tells me it was a huge success ._. No idea why, just a hint 
Whats the most obvious would be that midnight professions will introduce another set of 2-3 items per profession and its own lumber, wod lumber and its items will be fixxed i guess another set of items to craft/sell/buy.
But whats in between them patches would be more interesting. How to keep the token sale afloat since its obvious the demand will die down after midnight s1.
Housing is not endgame content. If it is too grindy or expensive, most people are going to abandon it, mainly because it is, essentially, a very elaborate sticker book. It does not offer any ingame advantages other than showing off.
The overwhelming majority of decor should come from activities that anyone can complete, and not from qualified endgame content such as raiding and PvP. People simply wonât bother.
They purposely have given it no in game advantage because then it just becomes mandatory content. Players have regularly given feedback about such mandatory features being unfun if the player has no interest in them.
Itâs a cosmetic feature. The items you can gather from a wide range of activities and much like transmog, pet, mounts and toys you can farm many of them once they are legacy content.
The bulk of decor can be gathered by anyone. Itâs no different to any other cosmetic collecting.
If you are struggling then there are various resources online or addons to guide you to the various vendors and drops.
Here we go
right on schedule lol
i 100% agree
blizzard is trying to use housing as a funnel to mythic and raids
same as they are using delves as a funnel to mythic and raids etc
for some reason blizzard just think that mythic and raids are universal pastime for every type of player
thats an unfortunate design philosophy indeed
xD
well if one given player needs n wow house chairs in their lifetime
then that player needs k <= n wow house chair types in their lifetime
then that player needs k wow house chair types recipes in their lifetime
so for all wow playerbase there exists some average k*, which represents how many wow house chairs recipes a wow player needs on average, after which every next recipe is needed by less and less people
meaning that blizzard will very rapidly reach a point, where they are producing recipes, that noone is using
meaning that printing recipes will result in chairs deflation
which is why adding new decor is a very temporary solution to keeping wow token price up and keeping housing engagement at least at present level
but blizzard dont seem to plan for long-term, they are solving the issue of this quarter KPI