Am I completely out of the loop here? Since when is it considered normal – or even acceptable – to give players “early access” to a major, expansion-defining feature three months before the actual expansion launch? Three months is practically an entire season of play. Some people don’t even play new expansions for that long.
Think about how absurd this would have felt in earlier expansions.
Imagine getting access to your Garrison months before Warlords of Draenor officially launched, or being able to establish your Class Hall and unlock its systems long before Legion hit the shelves. These weren’t small pre-patch teasers – they were foundational pillars of their expansions. Dropping something like that early would’ve felt like skipping ahead in a book you hadn’t even opened yet.
Can’t help but think back to when creators like TotalBiscuit actively pushed back against pre-orders and early access practices. There was a real concern that these systems would chip away at player trust and turn major releases into fragmented, monetized previews. Looking at where we are now… was all that resistance for nothing? Have we just quietly accepted this as the “new normal”?
https://youtu.be/CyGbbIB5eaM?si=xWlqk14uenTGJsJ_
It’s not locked befind pre-order, it’s locked behind order. It’s a Midnight feature, therefore you need Midnight. It’s also not comparable with Garrisons and Class Halls, because housing is a very isolated feature that you can ignore if you don’t want to engange with it.
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Whaaa… It’s not pet battles. This isn’t some minor side activity or optional fluff, but a core, defining feature of the entire expansion, something that should launch with the expansion, not months earlier for the sake of pre-orders.
Midnight doesn’t come out until March 2026 so we’re looking at nearly three months of gated, paid-for early access. It stops being just a “bonus” for pre-ordering, and starts looking a lot like a predatory business practice. They’re dangling essential content early to pressure people into buying in advance.
Funny how normalized this has become. No outrage, no pushback… just acceptance.
I guess I really must be out of the loop, and honestly I’m glad to be out of this whole circus.
Nope, you’re not getting my stuff. I’ve already given away all my gold.
Housing should have not been locked behind midnight purchase, but accessibile to everyone player that has an active sub.
Thats my opinion now roast me 
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I understand your point, but there are different models of “early access”. Bad early access is if you pay to play an alpha (or something similar) version of a game you don’t even know if it will be ever released and how it will look like, because with your early access you pay for the development. You also don’t know what the actual game will cost when it’s getting released.
But this is not the case here. You know how the game will look, you know pretty much what you’ll get, you know what you will pay for the game. It’s the exact amount of money you can pay now. If you want to use the housing system, you have to buy the game. If you buy the game now to use the housing system or you buy the game when the whole expansion gets released to use the housing system doesn’t really matter, does it?
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While I agree that preorder bonuses is a slimy practice.
I don’t really see a point in complaining over this. It’s basically WoW’s Animal Crossing. You can get in to it at any point and you don’t have any benefits whatsoever from starting early. It’s supposed to be an ever green feature stretching over all future expansions. The early access version is also somewhat limited.
Doing it this way will also mean that those who really want to put effort in to building their house can start now and then focus on the actual game when it releases so there will be a bigger pool of people engaging in instances and activities instead of half the playerbase sitting in the housing area.
If you we should be angry about something is the fact that there is a in-game store selling cosmetics in a payed+subscription game focused around collecting stuff (for a large part of the player base). The fact that people have gone from unanimously hating this, to a lot of players supporting is is depressing.
This is entirely optional. It has no power behind it. It won’t change your raid/m+ or pvp experience whatsoever.
What I don’t understand is why is this called a midnight feature when it is clearly a TWW one. We are not even at the prepatch yet.
Honestly its more like paying to beta test, there are a ton of bugs and missing features related to housing atm.