Feedback: Housing

In Development Midnight Beta Test
1

Welcome (home) to Beta!

We’re incredibly excited for you to get your hands on Housing. Please send in your feedback and file those bug reports since they’re critical for us to make this feature the best it can be.

Buying Your First House

When you login, you’ll be given a quest “A House for You” which will lead you to your faction’s Neighborhood, introduce the Steward, and take you on a tour of the Neighborhood, and ultimately direct you to buy your house.

Please note, the house cost is not final and assuming you used a template character, you’ll have plenty of gold to afford it.

Once you have a house, start building! You’ll be able to find a variety of decorations on vendors, professions, and throughout the world and use them to make your house a home. Lay out your rooms and expand into a spooky basement or lofty attic. Explore the Neighborhood and see what’s hidden around the corner or say hi to your neighbors.

Taking on Endeavors

Endeavors are a Neighborhood-wide activity open to anyone who lives in the Neighborhood. Endeavors occur approximately once a month and when a new Endeavor becomes available the Neighborhood is provided with the opportunity to learn from various cultures and factions of Azeroth by completing different tasks.

  • How to pick an endeavor
    • Public neighborhoods will have an endeavor assigned to them.
    • Private neighborhoods will have a neighborhood manager choose the endeavor for the neighborhood. Talk to your neighborhood steward to start one.
  • Rewards
    • Complete tasks to collect community coupons which can be spent at the endeavor trader to purchase themed decor.
    • Complete endeavor milestones by completing tasks to unlock new decor on the endeavor trader
    • Note: You can spend your community coupons at any endeavor trader, at anytime. Community coupons carry over between endeavors and can be taken to any trader in any neighborhood.
      • Assuming the neighborhood you are visiting has reached the requisite milestones, you can purchase the unlocked decor.
    • Completing an endeavor will grant a bonus reward to your account of some extra house XP and coupons.
      • Developers’ notes: This is not yet implemented.
  • Tasks
    • Endeavor tasks will both take you back to a zone (or zones) in Azeroth and beyond, and take place in your neighborhood.
    • Similar to the trading post, there will be some generic tasks for all endeavors, and many themed ones.
      • The themed ones will always be the more efficient tasks.
    • Tasks will reward Community Coupons, Gold, XP, Crests (at max level), and House XP, along with providing progress towards the endeavor.
    • Completing a task while in a neighborhood group will grant you extra progress towards the endeavor, unlocking milestones faster.
    • Many tasks can be repeated for fewer rewards, this is noted by a circular icon on the task.

New This Week

  • Additional decor is available from neighborhood vendors, and more new decor (neighborhood and otherwise) will be added throughout the Beta.

Please leave your Housing feedback and issues you encounter in this thread and any suggestions and ideas you may have in a separate forum post. Thank you and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on Housing!

5

Some feedback on decor collecting, right now it requires going all across the world to buy decor from vendors even if you’ve already bought it before. It already has a “10 XP upon first learn” so there clearly is already some sort of “collected decor” tracking going on, so maybe after buying it for the first time it should just be available to buy directly from the house chest or a nearby neighborhood vendor for whatever currency/cost it is on the original vendor so I don’t have to go all the way back to e.g. the Forbidden Reach to get another of a decor item I would like while designing.

On a similar note, the idea of consuming of dyes feels a bit player unfriendly right now, especially if you’d have to go to the AH (which won’t be available through the neighborhood unless you have a portable one) to get additional if you’re not an alchemist/scribe. I get wanting to do the whole crafting thing for it, but an unlockable dye system might feel a bit better, although it would be detrimental to alchemists/scribes. Boths pros and cons there, not sure for a good fix.

Something that’s likely already planned is being able to preview decor in-game with ctrl-click on items as well as being able to see what you’ve already discovered through e.g. the collectable UI similarly to appearances, but wanted to note it anyways.

One issue I spotted is that even while being in the same guild neighborhood, I don’t actually see my guildies from another realm walking around in it. I do see their plots/can visit their houses, though.

Other than that I’m loving housing so far, keep up the good work!

10 Likes
6

Housing has been temporarily disabled while we address an issue. We’ll update this thread and the update notes when it has been re-enabled.

7

Housing has been re-enabled. Here are the updates in Midnight Alpha Week 2:

What’s New in Alpha Week 2

  • Outside decoration should now be enabled, allowing you to decorate the outside of your house. Build the flamingo lagoon of your dreams! This also means you can move and rotate your house around your plot as well.
  • Similarly, you should also be able to customize the exterior of your house with various chimneys, roof options, dormers, and other architectural delights.
  • A variety of decor is now available at the Neighborhood vendors. Shop away!

Fixed Issues

  • The UI to select the destination house when visiting is no longer slow to load.
  • A whole lot of other less visible fixes have been made!

Known Issues

  • If you’re customizing your exterior and then you swap to any of the decor editing modes (Basic, Advanced, Customize, or Cleanup) the decor editing in that mode might not work.
    • Workarounds:
      • Avoid swapping straight between exterior customization to any of the other modes by exiting the House Editor completely.
      • If you do end up in this stuck state in a Decor mode, exit the House Editor completely, and re-enter it.
  • While editing the decor outside, if you try to move decor too far outside the plot boundaries, player movement might stop working or your client might crash.
    • Workarounds:
      • Don’t move stuff outside the edges of your plot.
      • If your movement gets stuck, log out and back in.
  • The red outline and gridlines that signify an “Invalid location” sometimes won’t show when moving decor or the House Exterior to an invalid location.
  • The House Exterior may float off the ground slightly while dragging it. This is purely visual.
  • Exterior doors are sometimes hard to click.
  • Moving your house will reset your exterior fixtures so those will have to be set again if you move.
1 Like
8

Hello,

I would like to provide some feedback on the housing based on my experience and observations during testing so far.

Firstly, I agree with most of Marlamin’s post, so I will not repeat the same points.

House Editing:
I really like the house editing feature; it feels very smooth and intuitive, even for someone like me who is not usually involved in this kind of activity.

I am aware there is a lot of feedback regarding copy, paste, and the undo option. I would also like to mention the cut option (Ctrl+X). For editing the house layout, I miss the ability to move the entry point to another location.

Regarding outdoor editing, it is difficult to determine where the border is, which makes it hard to plan the placement of certain items. However, I do appreciate the ability to move the house itself and to add and modify elements.

Decors:

Unlike Marlamin’s post, or rather to add to it, I do like the decors around Azeroth and appreciate bringing some life back to old zones, encouraging people to visit and purchase decors. Although it may be tiresome, I understand the reasoning behind having a vendor for learned items, even if it may reduce the need to go out. However, for items whose source is achievements or old instances, I find it more acceptable.

I enjoy the fact that there are interactable objects, such as the “Orcish Communal Stove”, which you can click on to cook a meal.

I explored Azeroth for decors and found that some decor items are priced very strangely, to the point of being unreasonably expensive for the relevant currency. One example is the Honorbound Service Medal currency and the Blightfire Lantern decor; a single lantern costs 150 Honorbound Service Medals, which requires an excessive amount of time to obtain. The same applies to resonance crystals - although they are easier to acquire, the drop rate is still low. I do not know if these prices are placeholders and will be adjusted, but this is my observation for now.

There are some decors I would like to see added. One is mannequins; I wish to display transmogs on mannequins, whether on different race models or in various poses, similar to those in the Trading Post or the Delver HQ in Dornagol. This could be implemented by adding the Transmog UI to an object. Another addition I think would be nice is Guild banner decor.

The catalogue appears to be in a very early stage of development, so I hope there will be sources for the items, whether discovered or otherwise.

I did encounter some issues during testing. One is the hiding of the UI during editing mode (Alt-Z). It brought my usual UI back up but did not remove the editor UI. It is important to remove the editor UI so I can have immersion and see how things look without the UI, in case I want to make sure everything appears as intended. Doing it twice exits edit mode.

The second issue I encountered of a similar nature is opening a map during edit mode. It disrupted the UI, and you need to press Escape and return to editing mode to continue.

The third issue is that moving the building itself caused it to float a bit, and I could not bring it back to the ground. I had to keep jumping to reach the platform to click the door.

Fourth, this is just a client-side visual issue but might be fixed soon. When you edit your own plot, you can grab other people’s items from afar to your own plot (it does not actually move them, and they will return), but if you click " remove object" it will disconnect you.

Overall, I do like the smooth editing and bringing the old world to life by adding decorations to old vendors. I hope for more regulated prices of different currencies, as well as some tweaks to the issues I pointed out.

Thank you for reading.

Zukau

2 Likes
9

I’d really like to request one (hopefully) simple addition to housing that I haven’t been able to find yet.

Glass.

Glass panes, glass doors, just something transparent that allows us to make better greenhouse style builds or custom windows.

Give me glass and this is a 10/10 feature for sure.

2 Likes
10

Below are the additions to Housing in Beta:

Taking on Endeavors

Endeavors are a Neighborhood-wide activity open to anyone who lives in the Neighborhood. Endeavors occur approximately once a month and when a new Endeavor becomes available the Neighborhood is provided with the opportunity to learn from various cultures and factions of Azeroth by completing different tasks.

  • How to pick an endeavor
    • Public neighborhoods will have an endeavor assigned to them.
    • Private neighborhoods will have a neighborhood manager choose the endeavor for the neighborhood. Talk to your neighborhood steward to start one.
  • Rewards
    • Complete tasks to collect community coupons which can be spent at the endeavor trader to purchase themed decor.
    • Complete endeavor milestones by completing tasks to unlock new decor on the endeavor trader
    • Note: You can spend your community coupons at any endeavor trader, at anytime. Community coupons carry over between endeavors and can be taken to any trader in any neighborhood.
      • Assuming the neighborhood you are visiting has reached the requisite milestones, you can purchase the unlocked decor.
    • Completing an endeavor will grant a bonus reward to your account of some extra house XP and coupons.
      • Developers’ notes: This is not yet implemented.
  • Tasks
    • Endeavor tasks will both take you back to a zone (or zones) in Azeroth and beyond, and take place in your neighborhood.
    • Similar to the trading post, there will be some generic tasks for all endeavors, and many themed ones.
      • The themed ones will always be the more efficient tasks.
    • Tasks will reward Community Coupons, Gold, XP, Crests (at max level), and House XP, along with providing progress towards the endeavor.
    • Completing a task while in a neighborhood group will grant you extra progress towards the endeavor, unlocking milestones faster.
    • Many tasks can be repeated for fewer rewards, this is noted by a circular icon on the task.

New This Week

  • Additional decor is available from neighborhood vendors, and more new decor (neighborhood and otherwise) will be added throughout the Beta.
11

I quite like the way housing is done. One thing that bothers me a little bit, and this feels like nitpicking but I think it could be good if adressed;

When you’re decorating your land plot, so outside of your house, it’s hard to see the border of your home. This creates for some mildly annoying situations where you either think you placed something or you are walking around for a different angle to view the situation from only to be taken from the editing window because you crossed your border.

It would be nice if the border would be shown more properly in edit mode, as to give us players an indicator where we can and cannot place things or run to when in editor mode.

5 Likes
12

A major problem for me is that we can’t see the plot borders in edit mode!

Can you please add a toggle option to show a red border on the grid displaying where our plot (and therefore exterior placement) ends?

Additionally, please mure sure every Light-Source from Chandeliers and co is toggable as on/off.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY! Please let us set the “exit point” when leaving the house interior. I want to be spawned at my door, not at the Cornerstone.

Another point on my wish-list would be the option to do Basements (sub-ground level) floors. Also, “secretive doors” such as the Bookshelf that can be bought at Vendors should have a “permission” feature so only specific people can open it as a door. Also should apply to doors in general.

I may want to have certain rooms inaccessible for visitors because they aren’t done yet or for plot reasons within Roleplay.

2 Likes
14

I admit, I haven’t had an opportunity to poke around inside Housing yet, but I don’t recall seeing this mentioned anywhere so far.

I would love to see the ability to have usable Training Dummies available inside my player home. So that I can, for example, set up a proper single target environment, or an AOE environment or even just be able to practice rotation away from other people.

15

Really bummed about the entrance loading screen, was hoping for an open door animation (hidden loading screen) or something similar to delves, with that warm yellow hue instead of the grey smog

16

Would be very hard to do a technical transition, considering the “not accurate” display of interior compared to exterior.

Like, you can have rooms that impossibly fit into the walls of your house. Loading them as you enter like Delves do would be very visible, since the world would be unloaded and your interior loaded.

(Bug already reported)

Some People seem to be unable to visit each others houses during testing.

17

Please add the option for Guild Leaders or Officers to evict a plot.

Currently a lot of guilds are planing out there plots but then some long lost friend decides to log in and choosen a random plot because he doesnt know better. Now he would need to be kicked from the guild to free his plot again.

All in all more permissons and management options besides endeavors would be really nice. Maybe even having subdivions for specific ranks.

With the current system many guilds will instead use charter neighborhoods be better control things.

1 Like
18

If that’s the case, it wouldn’t be hard to do an immersive “hidden” loading screen.

My gripe with the current iteration is just that it takes you out of the ‘world’, makes it feel incredibly sandboxy (even though I know it is), would just be nice to have better fluidity between the interior and exterior

19

Housing Exterior Budget

With 200 exterior budget, it is a bit hard to make something nice with the entire plot. I am on the beta server rn on setting up bushes and trees along the Plot border and just hit the maximum exterior budget.

I really recommend looking into it to raise it to 250/300 so a few more trees and items can be placed without massively increasing workload.

This is the most densest I was able to create: https://i.imgur.com/9CFWRHL.jpeg

Personally I would really recommend going with 300, so that people can actually physically close off the ground access to their home except for an entrance with fences, while also being able to place enough foliage, plants and decor for it to feel like home.

Base ground foliage, ground clutter and more

Please add an option to “paint” the zones in which grass and other ground clutter is displayed on the plot. I just encountered some grass clipping through my house entrance. While a minor thing, giving players more control over such things adds to player freedom and expression.

Edit (15.11.2025): Add options to create “ponds” on plots.

Don’t think I need to explain that one.

1 Like
20

Something I hardly see mentioned and that I yet do not believe to be a me-problem is that there should be a better way to edit your floorplan. If I’ve set up a beautiful house but then decide that I should have a small room right after the entryway I’d need to delete everything I’ve made because I can’t insert a room or change the shape of an existing room. Some types of rooms can only be unlocked later which makes it even more difficult. I’d have to figure out my entire layout before I even start.

How about you can float rooms around as much as you want when editing the floorplan, but you’d have to click a save button to exit and it pops up with an error message if there are unconnected rooms?

1 Like
21

I agree, not just what you described with moving rooms around, but we should also be able to freely rotate and place rooms, maybe I want a smaller room connected to the side of a larger room? Currently there’s no way to do this and we’re limited to center connections

22

A few things i’ve noticed i would like:

A undo button, sometimes i accidentally move the wrong item or move/resize things in a way i wasn’t intending. having an undo button would be great.

A housing view, more so for interior, sometimes getting a view is hard so having a view that can be more freely moved and positioned without worrying about walls etc would be nice.

Ability to use lighting outside, i am in the atmospheric duskwood area, being able to light up my plot to add to that atmoshpere would be awesome.

Higher limit for outdoor Decor.

wall set for the cottage wall covering, i’d like to add my own walls etc but i have nothing that matches the cottage wall covering, unless i just haven’t found it yet?

A catalogue of all items and where to find them and maybe the ability to rebuy stuff we have bought once already from within the catalogue.

More freedom to place rooms and/or doorways, so not everything has to be centered, and we can have doorways or rooms further along the walls. even a way to just completely remove one ajoining wall so we can make our own and place the door where we would like with the wall kits we have.

All in all it’s a great system and i’m looking forward to the proper release.

23

They should add a “flight mode” camera like Blender 3D for example has. While using it, your character model keeps standing where you entered edit mode for housing.

Speaking of lighting, Blizzard, please also fix/update the ambient occlusion maps to work with color options on items.

The ambient occlusion shadows shouldn’t disappear just because we are using a different color. Make a different Alpha map and multiply it with the base color chosen on the texture.

24

I like housing, but you need to make it work like auction house, or sell NPC for gold that has everything. Going back to specific NPC buy what I want… its not even that, but there is just to much building materials to choose from. And its best when you are near your house and scroll peacefully from menu items you want. Once you buy item from NPC it should appear in menus to be obtainable for same amount of gold.