A (Futile?) Endeavour

In my last post about first impressions of the Midnight pre-patch, I mentioned checking out endeavours and being disappointed that they seemed to consist of nothing but two new daily quests in the town centre. I wanted to write a follow-up since I've found that there is more to them than that, but they are messed up in an entirely different way.

First off, I learned that several endeavours are live at the same time, but your neighbourhood has to pick one (if it's managed) or gets one assigned randomly (if it's public). Mine was assigned the dracthyr (with a portal to the Forbidden Reach), but there are also ethereals (with a portal to Netherstorm), grummels (Kun-Lai Summit), mechagnomes (Mechagon) and niffen (Zeralek Cavern).

There is an endeavours tab in the housing window now, which shows you a bar to progress and activities to do so, similar to the Traveler's Log. Unfortunately the UI is not very intuitive. Still, once I understood the assignment, I travelled to the Forbidden Reach (now scaled to level 80) and went at it like it was 2023 again: chasing rares, mining Dragonflight ore, opening Zkera vault doors. Since the indicators on the UI weren't very clear, it took me a bit to figure out that the game discourages you from doing the same task over and over as there are diminishing returns on each completion, which is something that sounds sensible in theory but in practice there already aren't that many tasks to begin with, meaning you can quickly run out of things that give points.

Worse, a single person's progress is basically not even measurable. The overall endeavour progress gives you no details about how many "points" you need or have earned, it just has those milestones dividing the bar into quarters, and all my efforts seemed to do virtually nothing. There's also an activity tracker to show you who else has been working on the endeavour in your neighbourhood, and over the past day it's all been me. Before that I saw a few people getting credit for "killing a raid boss" or "doing a delve", which were probably not done specifically for the neighbourhood, and maybe one or two names actually doing things in the neighbourhood or in the Forbidden Reach. I'm guessing the complete lack of visible progress put them off after a while though.

Apparently the progression bar is supposed to have some sort of dynamic scaling, as people in small guilds were able to fill up the whole bar in a matter of days, but if you're in a public neighbourhood where most people don't really care about endeavours and only put down a house because the UI kept nagging them about it, it seems you're just out of luck. Five days into the forty-day endeavour, I reckon we've achieved less than five percent progress. If we wanted to hit the final reward in time for the end, we'd need to be at least halfway towards the first milestone already (12.5%?).

I'm not that bothered because I'm currently not that invested in this housing system anyway, but it's still a shame that the devs have been so far off the mark on this one. I'm sure the numbers will be adjusted eventually, but the whole thing just feels badly thought out. They wanted neighbourhoods to be a thing "for the social aspect" and gave us endeavours as something to work on together, but there isn't even a way to properly communicate with the people in your public neighbourhood.

So far, endeavours have only managed to make me feel more lonely in retail WoW than I've felt in a long time. It seems to be commonly agreed that retail is not good at fostering cooperation and community spirit, but it does generally feel lively enough to me. Dornogal is always busy, and I always see people out and about in the world, whether they are gathering, doing world quests or what have you. However, being the sole person in a public neighbourhood who's trying to progress the endeavour on their own while achieving absolutely nothing is a decidedly isolating experience. If they want this to be viable for public neighbourhoods with mixed engagement levels, they'll have to do a lot more than just tweak the numbers.

Midnight Pre-Patch Impressions

The Midnight pre-patch landed this week, and I feel like I approach this kind of update with more and more trepidation as time goes by. Where I used to be excited to see what's new, now I just sigh. Oh, all my alts' talents are reset again? Addons stopped working again? These changes always just seem to mean more and more chores.

That said, the addon situation actually wasn't that bad. For all the talk about the "addon apocalypse", I was pleasantly unaffected as someone who never used many combat addons to begin with, and the few utility addons I do have all had updated versions available for once (I think because Blizz disabled the "use out-of date addons" option for this patch from what I read, which forced all the addon creators to get a move on). It's rare that all my addons have been this up to date all at once!

The warband screen was simultaneously an amusing and horrifying surprise. I knew that part of the pre-patch was a revamp of the transmog system, but what I didn't anticipate was that this was going to strip all my characters of their current transmogs, which made the lot of them look like hideous clowns.

I kid you not, the random shaman alt that I last played through Burning Crusade Chromie Time and who hadn't mogged any of her gear actually looked the best of the lot. We used to make fun of the BC "clown suits" but at least everything you got back then still looked like armour, even if it was easy to end up with a lot of mismatched colours. In modern WoW, so many of the armour sets are these ridiculous fortresses of spires and wings and god knows what, they often look awkward enough when you wear the full set, never mind jumbling pieces from different ones together. Basically, this experience taught me that modern WoW needs trangsmog or we'd all look unbearably hideous.

My little BC-levelling shaman actually looking pretty good. 

So I logged into my warrior with the intent to get her good looks back and immediately hit a snag. Over the course of War Within, my six-year-old PC has increasingly started to struggle with retail WoW, with the most common symptom being the game freezing up and the screen temporarily going black for a second or two, before assets start to slowly load back in one by one. Most frequently this happened after hearthing to Dornogal or - you might have guessed it - when I opened the transmog window.

I was hoping that the revamp would result in a more streamlined UI that would perhaps be easier on my machine, but the opposite was the case: now the game actually crashed entirely whenever I tried to open the transmog interface. Fortunately I wasn't the only one who's been struggling with variations of this problem for a while, so Google led me to a variety of tips that were supposed to help: changing from DirectX 12 back to 11, adding an additional command line argument to my Battle.net launcher for whenever I start WoW, marking my WoW folder as "do not index" in Windows... in the end I'm not sure what eventually did the trick, or maybe each step helped a little, but I eventually got the game back into a playable state. It still chugs and struggles with the transmog window, but at least it no longer crashes and I was able to update some looks. Going through all my dozens of alts will be a lot of work though...

Wanting to distract myself from the impending chores, I decided to revisit the random neighbourhood where I had plopped down my house a few weeks ago. It was interesting to have a bit of a look around and see what my neighbours had been up to in their yards. One guy's house was floating high in the air, something I'd only read about previously.

Endeavours were also supposed to finally be live, one of the housing-related features that had initially intrigued me. So I visited the town square and two dracthyr gave me one daily quest each, one to help with smelting some ore via a short mini game, and one to pick up some vegetables from a nearby farm. That was it. I got two pieces of some new currency that I didn't know anything about but which I guess will probably be good for buying decorations. I honestly expected a lot more out of this feature. Something to make us actually leave the neighbourhood and then come back.

Anyway, Midnight is coming. I'd like to write up some thoughts about that in the next few weeks, as well as a little War Within retrospective.

MoP Classic: Still the Better Housing

I expected that I'd be dropping Mists of Pandaria Classic the moment I finished my "Project Vale", but surprisingly, this has not been the case. In fact, I got back into it more vigorously than I'd been playing while just trying to get to level 90.

I think the main reason for that has been the farm. Everything associated with it, from the Tiller reputations and the vegetable-planting mini game to maxing out my cooking skills in all the different Pandaren "ways" is just plain fun to me. It helped to keep me engaged for a few months during my original time in MoP back in 2013/14 and wasn't part of the MoP Remix experience, so it's genuinely been over a decade since I last did all these things and I'm happy to do them again.

After my disappointment with retail's new housing system, it also stood out to me how the farm, to me, still feels like better housing than the new system. The farm is located in a beautiful, central zone and while it uses phasing, you can transition into your personal area without needing to go through a portal or loading screen so it's a very integrated experience. The neighbourhood feels alive with all the different Tillers visiting the Halfhill market throughout the week. And the farming gives you a reason to visit every day and spend a few minutes there, without trying to keep you cooped in all day like the WoD garrisons did. It's the reason I've got my hearthstone set to Halfhill instead of the Shrine of the Seven Stars, even though the latter is where all the portals and vendors are. It feels like home. Comparatively, retail housing allows me to place and arrange my own chairs in a dark box that's an instance inside an instance located nowhere in specific. I know what matters more to me.

Another thing that I've been working on has been the Golden Lotus reputation, because I wanted to see whether raising it would unlock some more quests that no longer exist in retail. And indeed, my first reward for doing all those dailies was to unlock even more dailies. They're still not among my favourite quests, though I did do a double take when Ren Firetongue casually suggested that Anji and Kun Autumnlight may be looking to have a threesome with me. Not something I would've expected from WoW quest dialogue to be honest!

I also unlocked a one-time quest that had me collecting three relics of the Thunder King, with the Golden Lotus deciding that the safest thing to do was to put them all into a single room in the Guo-Lai Halls. There's no way that could possibly go wrong, I'm sure!

Doing all these dailies has been pretty good for my hunter's wallet as I have very few expenses, so her savings have shot up by the thousands. I'm sure it's still nothing compared to someone who's actually played through the last three Classic expansions consistently but it still makes me feel pretty rich. I actually don't think it's as easy to make money just from questing in modern WoW, which is weird when I think about it. I've noticed that throughout the first few expansions, gold rewards from quest completions kept going up in pretty big leaps. In vanilla Classic you get about four gold per quest completed at max level, in BC that doubled to about eight or nine, I think in Wrath it was fifteen? Don't quote me on the exact numbers, but the point is that rewards kept going up for several years, and then they just... stopped. Inflation kept going, and there are some quests in retail that give payouts in the hundreds and thousands, but "regular" questing is way less profitable in modern WoW than it used to be. Just something to think about.

The wider endgame in MoP Classic is of course a bit disappointing compared to modern WoW. It's basically dailies, dungeons or raiding, and that's it. I wasn't initially planning to engage with any of that beyond the dailies I'd already chosen to do for other reasons, but at some point I found myself wondering whether I had earned enough reputation with the Golden Lotus to buy a gear upgrade or two, and that quickly led me down a rabbit hole of where else you can get what gear, how crafted gear compares, how the item upgrade system works, trying to figure out what stats I wanted as a hunter in MoP, and more.

So now I've also run all the dungeons on heroic, and today I ran my first three "celestial" dungeons, the "slightly harder" version of heroics that's meant to serve as a replacement for LFR in terms of gearing. I'm not quite sure what to think of those yet. There were a lot of celestial-related fireworks going on that I didn't fully understand, with some coloured circles actually being good to stand in, but in terms of overall feel they didn't seem significantly harder than heroics. (Though there was that one time I got one-shot by some sort of explosion where I'm still not sure what caused it.)

People are definitely not as forgiving as they are in LFR though. In those three runs I was in, there were two vote kicks. I actually voted yes on the first one, because the guy had joined with res sickness, which... yeah, you shouldn't do that (though I wouldn't have initiated a kick myself). The second time someone tried to kick another hunter in the group for the reason "low", which I assume meant dps, but I voted no on that one cause it seemed mean, and it failed. Karma promptly punished me for my solidarity as the same hunter then outrolled me on all the hunter loot that dropped at the end. Oh well.

No Guild Housing for Me, I Guess

Housing has arrived in modern WoW, something Blizzard Watch referred to as "the biggest week for Warcraft since 2004". My feeds are filled with screenshots of some admittedly pretty creative houses. Yet strangely... I feel nothing. Except maybe some slight jealousy that people are so clearly excited for something that simply seems to do nothing for me.

The thing that had me the most intrigued about WoW's version of housing was the promise of guild neighbourhoods and endeavours, as the things I read about those things reignited fond memories of tending to our guild stronghold in Neverwinter for me. That not all of these features are part of the early access is fair enough, but unfortunately I also learned that a guild neighbourhood will require ten continuously active players to be maintained, or else it will be closed down.

It's not entirely clear to me how "active" will be defined in this context, as Blizzard has understandably been cagey about restrictions that could generate any negative press, but it's clear that it won't work like creating a guild, where you just need ten people to sign the charter at the beginning and then everyone but one person can leave and the guild still remains.

Our little guild only has seven active members right now, and while we could probably coax a few friends of friends into moving an alt over to make up the numbers, I wouldn't trust those players to remain whatever definition of "active" is required, and opening a guild neighbourhood just to have it get shut down the moment that tenth player stops playing would just be too depressing. I understand that for logistical reasons there probably had to be some limitations to avoid spinning up too many empty neighbourhoods, but I don't have to like this particular implementation.

So that immediately dampened my enthusiasm, but then everything else about the new housing system also left me weirdly cold. I did the tutorial, bought my first house in a random public neighbourhood, spent a few thousand gold on vendor decos, placed a few of them, and then logged out.

I actually went back to my first post about SWTOR's housing to see whether I felt similarly aimless and confused back when that came out over a decade ago but no, I was actually significantly more excited back then, so I'm not sure what it is about WoW's housing that just seems to miss the mark for me right now. I knew I was never a huge housing enthusiast, but based on how I feel about it in SWTOR, I expected it to speak to me in some way?

The best guess I can hazard is that for me, housing is less about building and decorating and more about a sense of place. Re-reading the above blog post about SWTOR, I had to chuckle at this little tidbit that I'd completely forgotten about: "I did unlock all the rooms on Coruscant though, and promptly felt the urge to throw myself off the balcony just to see if it was possible or if I'd get stopped by invisible walls. (The answer is, I died.) Since it was advertised in the description as offering freedom from safety restrictions, I just had to know!"

I've seen people enthusiastic about the way things work in WoW make comparisons to the Sims, and as someone who went through her own Sims phase about twenty years ago now, building and setting up a house was always my least favourite part of that experience. I just wanted my Sims to have a comfortable space to have their adventures in.

WoW's housing feels like it's purely optimised for builders, with very little sense of immersion and worldliness. Every house is a Tardis whose inside bears zero resemblance to its outside. And while the "neighbourhood" is a space, I was shocked to find that it's a space in limbo. What I mean by that is that I knew it was going to be instanced, but I thought it was going to be instanced the way something like Warsong Gulch is instanced - which still has a marked location on the map, and the instance just allows us to have a little more space on the inside of the instance than there should strictly be available on the world map.

From all the screenshots I'd seen of Founder's Point, the Alliance neighbourhood, I was convinced that it would have a similar sort of entrance somewhere around where Westfall, Duskwood and Elwynn Forest meet, so that people could pretend to have a house somewhere on the edge of either of those zones. But no, Founder's Point is just an island in the middle of nowhere, like Exile's Reach, devoid of any real connection to the rest of the map and only accessible by portal. I hate that, even if I'm fairly sure that it's the kind of thing that won't even register with most players. I thought I was going to be able to plop down a house at the edge of Elwynn Forest. I don't care about living on some random island.

I also thought that we were going to get a second hearthstone, one for an inn as before and one for our new home. Instead there's just a "teleport to plot" button in the housing window. It's convenient, but nobody cares about how any of this is supposed to fit in with the rest of the world.

Lumber, the new crafting reagent to make housing decos, is also weird. I feel like woodcutting should really have been a profession, even if it was a secondary one. Instead you have to buy an axe from one specific vendor, and then this item works as a tracker for lumber while in your bag, independent of the normal tracking UI. Also, all the wood you gather is warbound, so you can't even trade any of it. Why is regular old lumber of all things bound to me? It's just weird.

Finally, maybe the complete lack of utility of housing right now is another thing that's putting me off. SWTOR's strongholds were initially required to access the legacy cargo hold, though I'm not sure whether that's still a requirement now that there are some of those on the fleet as well. Again, I get that the Blizzard devs wanted to avoid another WoD situation where everyone just sits in their garrison all day, but I'd say it's possible that they've perhaps been a bit too aggressive in their efforts to avoid giving housing any utility whatsoever. Would being able to have a mailbox at your door hurt anyone for example?

I'm not writing the whole feature off entirely at this point - it's very possible that I'll loot a decoration one day that'll make me want to go back to my house to proudly place it on my wall, or maybe I'll suddenly discover enthusiasm for crafting decorations, but right now it just feels like a lot of... stuff with zero appeal to me, which is strange - and a bit sad to be honest, as I'd love to have fun along with everyone else. I know it's easy to say "housing just isn't for everyone" but... it has been for me in some contexts, so the fact that nothing about this particular implementation has clicked for me in this first week has been surprising to me.

Retail Bits & Bobs

I'm actually having more fun in Cataclysm Classic than in any other version of the game right now, how weird is that? Still, things haven't exactly been quiet in retail either, rather the opposite - it's just that nothing has been particularly sticky for me. Some notes on what's been going on: 

Retribution Paladin

I finished levelling the paladin I wrote about last month. I didn't get to the cap before the bonus XP event ended, but I was well into War Within by that point and the last few levels didn't take me long at all.

I can see why retribution paladins are so popular. People loved the idea of that class even back in Vanilla, when it performed really poorly in terms of output, so I'm not surprised that it's still popular now that it's more balanced and comes with a lot more shiny effects attached. Fighting as a retribution paladin is basically a massive light show with literal bells and whistles going off everywhere and hammers flying around, and it's just plain fun.

With the free delve keys you get from Renown it was surprisingly quick and easy to get her into a set of decent gear, but now I already find myself thinking "what now" again. Still, it was nice to actually play and level my first ever character in current content after all these years, even if I'll continue to primarily think of her as the one that first explored Elwynn Forest, fought gnolls in Redridge, protected weaker party members on a moonlit night in Loch Modan and got yelled at for tanking badly in the Deadmines.

Horrific Visions

The current patch (11.1.5) got criticised a lot for drip-feeding its content with too much time-gating, which is something I really don't mind, but what is true (for me at least) was that each part of the patch that was released later was less interesting to me than the previous one.

I loved the Nightfall event even if it was buggy and farmed my way to maximum Renown with the associated faction, but the return of Horrific Visions (a feature that was originally part of Battle for Azeroth) was already a lot less interesting to me. The husband and I actually dabbled in these a bit at the end of BfA when we first started playing again, but we didn't stick with them for very long, for reasons I can't recall now.

This time around, I think I already said during the second or third run that I could see these becoming boring really quickly. Sure, repeating content is a big part of WoW and MMOs in general, but there's just something about these little scenarios that makes the repetition even more blatant and tedious. It's become a bit more interesting as we've started to challenge ourselves a little with the higher difficulties, but I still wouldn't want to do these more than a couple of times a week.

Dastardly Duos

Finally, the latest part of the patch to be released belatedly was something called "Dastardly Duos", which I'd heard content creators praise while it was on the PTS, but my personal experience with this feature was comically bad. You see, the husband and I queued into them, and I thought that they would scale to your group size like delves and visions do. There were helpful NPCs at the start, but again I was thinking of Horrific Visions - where the general recommendation was to dismiss the help since it just increased mob health and wasn't actually all that helpful - and simply dismissed them.

This turned out to be a big mistake, as the content is clearly intended for five characters, and your gear is scaled down as well (something I had no idea about), so we got absolutely smashed and soon found ourselves camped at the spawn point. There was a timer on screen so I thought "oh well, let's just let the timer run out" but that did not complete the instance. We couldn't find any exit button either! I eventually distracted the mobs for a bit so the hubby's mage could hearthstone out, and I managed to get out the same way a bit later. It was just funny and bizarre but also totally killed any desire we'd had to engage with this content. Nothing like being thrown into an instance where you can't tell what's going on, get spawn-camped by NPCs and can't figure out how to leave.

I did eventually go back and complete a couple of rounds with the NPC group as intended, but I still didn't really understand what was supposed to be the point and it just didn't look particularly fun. There are plenty of more entertaining things for me to do instead of struggling to figure this out. 

In fact the next patch, 11.1.7, is already supposed to launch this week, so there's already something new to check out, yet again.

Legion Remix

During PAX East, something that was already floating around as a rumour was officially confirmed: that there'll be another Remix event like last year's Mists of Pandaria Remix, only this time it's going to be for Legion and it's going to launch towards the end of the year. I ultimately ended up liking MoP Remix quite a lot, so I'm looking forward to this, but at the same time my own experiences with Legion weren't that long ago and I didn't play the expansion at all when it originally came out, so I'm not currently feeling a lot of nostalgia for it.

I also have a character of every class at the level cap now (plus the extra paladin mentioned above) so what would I even level next? Another one of every class on the opposite faction, trying out different race and class combos? Not sure where I'll end up landing on all this. 

Housing Hype

And because all of this clearly isn't enough, Blizzard also keeps trickling out more news about housing. There's been a few dev blogs on the subject, such as this one and this one, and last month they had an event where different content creators got an early preview of how things are going, which resulted in a lot of them making gushing videos about the experience.

I'm following all this with interest but at the same time I'm not that much of a housing enthusiast that I'm on the edge of my seat (which is why I haven't felt the need to post about any of the above until now). In fact, a lot of the more advanced features don't sound all that interesting to me because I don't think I'd ever use them, so I was mainly relieved that it's been stated that there'll be a basic editor for players like me who just want to keep it simple.

One quote that amused me and that stuck with me (though I sadly can't remember now where I heard it) was something along the lines of: "Interior and exterior are completely separate, so your house can be much bigger on the inside, like the TARDIS. Or as we should say in WoW, like Naxxramas." 

Housing Comes to WoW: Some Educated Guesses

I've been meaning to write more about the prospect of housing coming to WoW. We've had a few dev interviews that cleared up a couple of questions since the Warcraft Direct stream, but overall, we still don't know a lot, and I'm probably not the only one who's wondering about both the possibilities and potential problems. Overall I'm still excited about the prospect of housing, but I can definitely see some issues with it too.

First off, I'd like to quickly address a few things that I've seen people bring up and that I actually don't think will be problems.

Will housing be a one-expansion feature?

I can't blame anyone for being cynical about Blizzard's intentions, but the people whom I've seen express this fear usually haven't played retail in at least a couple of years and are a bit behind the times so to speak. The devs have since acknowledged that players didn't like the pattern of them constantly adding new features just to discard them two years later, they've vowed to do better, and we've seen them live up to that promise in Dragonflight and War Within so far. Everyone can have their own standards for how much it would take them to be convinced, but I've seen enough to believe them on this.

Plus, by all indications this housing thing has been in the works for at least three years, which to me indicates that this isn't something that Blizzard is taking lightly. In fact, the addition of Warbands retroactively makes additional sense now, as purely character-bound houses would've been a logistical nightmare at this point and they clearly needed to sort out how to make more things account-wide before giving us housing.

They're just going to put all the housing stuff in the cash shop!

Again, I can't blame people for being cynical, but I just don't think this assertion fits Blizzard's current MO. Housing is likely to introduce a huge number of new items into the game (or at least repurpose a lot of existing items so they can also be placed inside your house too), and considering that the WoW cash shop is relatively light on direct sale items (at least when compared to other MMO cash shops I've seen), suddenly stuffing it with microtransactions for every possible piece of furniture would seem rather out of character.

I'm not claiming that the Blizzard devs are too "good" for this either, but they simply don't need to do it that way to make money off housing. They'll just need to make it a gold sink, and since the WoW Token exists, people buying tokens to finance their new furniture addiction will generate extra income for them automatically. I mean, I could see them putting one special house in the shop for launch or something, but I think in general they'll be happy to let the extra cash roll in through WoW Token sales.

Isn't this likely to just be Garrisons 2.0?

So I think this isn't likely to happen either, mainly because Ion has outright said that they've learned their lessons from Garrisons and won't repeat the same mistakes. He's categorically stated that there'll be no player power tied to housing, and that Garrisons were never really meant to be housing anyway, just a riff on classic Warcraft base-building. The latter made me raise my eyebrows a little but I can't be bothered to go back and try to research whether it was the devs or fans who first referred to Garrisons as WoW's version of housing.

Anyway, I believe Ion when he says that housing won't be tied to player power, and just based on the short teaser trailer, I think the devs also understand that proper housing needs to allow for far more customisation than Garrisons did. However, there were other things wrong with Garrisons, and I'll concede that we'll need to wait and see whether the dev team has really learned all the lessons from Garrisons' mistakes. After all, they are very prone to over-incentivising new features in some way to make sure everyone engages with them (*cough*delves*cough*) and there are ways other than player power that could make housing feel mandatory as something to have and spend time on, for example if there's too much convenience tied to your house that you can't get elsewhere. I'm not yet convinced that the WoW devs are truly brave enough to just add housing and let it be like transmog, something that people just engage with for fun and because they enjoy looking at pretty things on their screen.

Is WoW housing going to be instanced or not?

I've been surprised to see people even ask that question. Wasn't WoW one of the pioneers of making instancing for dungeons and raid bosses commonplace? A lot of MMOs have housing, but the number of them that have non-instanced housing is comparatively small, and it pretty much always seems to cause issues. I have no doubt that WoW housing will be instanced, though how these instances will be set up exactly (e.g. whether there'll be something like neighbourhoods) remains to be seen.

How could they possibly satisfy everyone?

I think the biggest challenge that Blizzard is going to face with implementing housing at this point in WoW's life is that they've never been quite so behind the times with adding a desired new feature, which means that players have literally had several decades of building houses in other MMOs and developing expectations based on that. Not to mention that WoW itself has had decades of its own content that should all be integrated into the system somehow when it launches.

No matter how much effort the devs put into housing's launch, I think it's pretty much destined to feel lacking in some way at first, because people will want different houses and furniture in the style of every playable race, they'll want to be able to collect trophies from every dungeon and raid in the game, they'll want to display each and every one of their hundreds of mounts and pets, they'll want new professions that gather wood and craft furniture... you get the idea.

Free-form or hook-style?

One thing opinions are already split on is how placement of furniture should work. Many people will want to be able to place things completely at their own leisure to fully unleash their creativity... but to be honest I think there'll be some limitations on that. I can see the devs opting for something like the flexible hook system used by SWTOR's strongholds, mainly because like Star Wars, Warcraft is a pretty strong IP with a unique visual identity, and I don't think they'll want people posting pictures of their WoW house containing a giant dick built out of chairs, or having to deal with reports of oh so funny players painting swastikas on the floor via strategic placement of candles (and you just know that WoW players would absolutely do both of those things if left entirely to their own devices).

What else can go wrong?

Finally, and this is a point that I have to admit hadn't occurred to me until I saw someone else mention it: there are practical risks to trying to retro-fit such a giant new system into an old game on a tight schedule. I think I mentioned in a previous post that Blizzard seemingly decided recently that it's better to release content on a quick cadence and let a bunch of bugs slip through, rather than to stick to polishing things until they're as bug-free as possible and make people wait for next patch. To be clear, they'd already lost their reputation for "Blizzard polish" some time ago, but it's definitely gotten worse with The War Within.

And I've got to admit that so far, that trade-off has felt worthwhile to me personally at least, as I haven't run into any major issues myself. When I see stuff like a shaman's totems floating off into the distance during the Dawnbreaker dungeon, it just makes me laugh, but not everyone's been this lucky. The introduction of Warband banks led to some people losing the contents of their guild bank for example, to which Blizzard's ultimate response was basically "too bad, so sad". That's something that may technically be covered under their terms of service, but it's also led to some pretty unhappy customers, and I can't blame anyone for worrying what's going to come next, now that they've established a precedent for accidental data loss on a large scale being something that players just have to put up with.

All in all, I remain optimistic and interested in seeing WoW's implementation of housing, but let's just say there's a lot of room for things to go wrong and it remains to be seen whether the launch will be an unequivocal success or end up being more of a calamity.

Warcraft Direct: MoP Classic, Fresh Servers & Housing Confirmed

Last night we were treated to Blizzard's "Warcraft Direct" stream, which was generally seen as a sort-of replacement for BlizzCon this year. And they still know how to draw numbers - I was watching on Twitch (because I could earn some free mounts in the process) and the viewer count sat pretty steadily at around 170k concurrent... and that's without counting those who were watching through other channels, such as YouTube and TikTok.

I'll start off by pointing out the one thing that kept bugging me stylistically: whenever they kept changing the camera angle without changing the way the speaker was facing. That was just such a weird artistic choice and constantly distracted me. It's strange when someone talks to you on screen, seemingly addressing you but staring off to somewhere vaguely to the right! Stop doing that!

Anyway, with that out of the way, the announcements started with the more boring stuff first (no offense to anyone who was thrilled by more Hearthstone expansions) - I guess they knew that the vast majority of people were there for WoW and therefore saved that until the end. Early on we got a shout-out for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (about which I still mean to write a separate post) and its associated charity drive, which I thought was sweet and in which Holly revealed that she personally met his parents.

In terms of actual game news, Mists of Pandaria Classic was confirmed for next year with its own launch trailer. I already mentioned a few weeks ago where I stand on this one.

However, there will also be "Classic Classic" launching in only a week! I guess the "fresh lovers" got their wish at last, though it's also been confirmed that these servers will be progressing into Burning Crusade, which may muddy the waters for some people? Because once again, where do those characters go after? Interestingly, a new hardcore server will be launching at the same time, and that progressing into BC would be something new for sure. Can't wait to see the clips of someone suffering permadeath at the feet of a fel reaver or something.

Again, as I said previously, this isn't really for me. I can't deal with the rushing, FOMO and mega-server environment any longer, but it'll be interesting to observe for sure.

On the retail front, it was confirmed that while we're still awaiting patch 11.0.7, 11.1 after that will take us to the underground goblin capital of Undermine, something that had already been speculated about for a while. I can't say that this sounds like the most appealing location to me, but we'll see.

What intrigued me about this one was that there was talk about us getting a special car ground mount which sounded like it will feature dynamic ground riding, which was another one of those things dataminers had found hints about some time ago. Curious how that will pan out.

At this point in the stream I was kind of like: okay, all of that sounds decent but I can't say I'm actively excited about any of it. Then Ian concluded his segment by saying that there was just one more thing they wanted to show us, and a little trailer began playing, showing a male human warrior in the new tier two armour entering a house. "Now what's this," I wondered, and it slowly dawned on me as the camera showed him walking past a bunch of decorations including an Ony head on the wall.

The trailer then shows him comfortably sitting down with a mug that says "home sweet home" and we get the tag line "your next adventure begins at home", followed by the logo for the next expansion (Midnight). I was keeping some notes already and just wrote down "HOUSING" in all caps. Good job, Blizzard, for saving the biggest hype feature until the end.

It's funny because I'm not even the biggest housing enthusiast myself, but it's just felt way overdue for the game at this point. Ian Hazzikostas actually commented in an interview a few years ago that they were finally looking into it, and I already half-expected a housing announcement at last year's BlizzCon; it just felt like it had to happen eventually, and here we are now.