WoWDB Housing Hub Updates, Player Housing Dev Interviews

No Charter Neighborhoods This Week, Blood Elf and Night Elf Exteriors Available in Midnight

WoWDB Housing Hub Updates
Early Access housing is almost here and we have made a lot of changes to the Housing Hub since we last posted about it!

• Early Access Decor List - All (or most) of the decor that will be availible for early access housing
• Decor Dye Previews - Use the modelviewer to see what decor will look like when dyed
• Decor Vendor Locations - Plan a route to quickly buy decor and level your house
• Item Sets - Want to make a Fel themed room? Check out this Fel Green item set that a user put together! Or this Pirate set.
• Builds - Want to learn how to build a waterfall? A Hobbit house? Gaming room? Or even a toilet? We've got you covered.
• Neighborhood Plot Map - If you haven't picked your plot yet, now is the time to narrow down your list. Log in to favorite plots.
• Decor Sync - Use the Dump Decor addon to import your owned and placed decor to the site so that you can filter by owned and not owned decor.
• Floorplan Gallery - Create floorplans or get ideas about how to lay out your house
• Expanded Search Terms - We've added additional search terms for most decor on the site. Looking for grapes? Here are some grapes.

Early Access Decor
You can see a full list of Early Access Decor, sources, and costs right now. If you sign in, you can favorite things to make a list of liked items or build a item set.



Decor Dye Previews
Want to get an idea of what an item will look like when dyed while you wait on servers to come back up? Filter the list to dyeable items and open them in the modelviewer.



Decor Vendor Locations
Leveling your house is is done by learning decor items for the first time. Check out the decor vendor page to get coordinates to all of the vendors so that you can quickly purchase decor to level your house.



WoW Player Housing Builds
There are some very cool builds on the WoWDB Housing Hub. We've highlighted a handful below.



Player Housing - WOWKEA Dev Interview
WOWKEA had an interview with Jay Hwang (Principal Artist and Decor Design Lead) and Garth DeAngelis (Associate Production Director).


Progression and Costs

• Currency requirements for decor from old content are still being adjusted, they shouldn't be too hard to get. Please report things that still cost too much. It shouldn't be grueling and not fun.
• Housing is new, the team wants to make sure you don't earn all of the decor in a few hours and then have nothing left to earn.
• Housing progression levels will go beyond Level 5 or 6. Housing is a long journey.
• Larger exterior house sizes will be tied to progressing your house past the current Level 5 or 6 cap.

Decor, Styles & Collections

• The team will continue to add more legacy content decor items, as well as decor from new content.
• The team has talked about the Heritage Armor rollout timeline concern and is working to put plans into place to make sure housing styles come out at a reasonable pace.
• The wall/floor material option system is built so that the team can add more over time.
• The team is working on a way for players to show off what they have earned in the game. Not just decor, but things you wear and hold.

Building Mechanics & Technical Limits

• Artisanal rooms and things like the hidden bookshelf were just ideas that came up from the team playtesting housing. They were trying to make fake windows and rather than requiring people to place lots of lights, they added an entire room with a skybox.
• The team will work on finding the right budget cap amount and you can expect it to go up as patches come out. They don't want the servers to crash at launch.
• The team was initially going to fix the bug of being able to put a chair into something, scale it down, and make the object have a surface that you can sit on. They saw what the community did with it and left it alone.

Future Features & Feedback

• Artisanal rooms don't have to be all skybox rooms, there could be things like a water room or other ideas in the future.
• Controllable light decor that isn't tied to a piece of art is something the team is talking about, such as the light blocks in Minecraft.
• They also have talked about rain, other sound, cricket sounds, and other things that the team could do. No promises yet, but please provide feedback.
• The team is taking note of feedback, they are aware people are building stairs, want a cloning system, want basements and more.

Player Housing - Taliesin & Evitel Dev Interview
Taliesin & Evitel sat down with Principal Game Director Jesse Kurlancheek and Senior UX Designer Joanna Gianulis


Design Philosophy & Communication

• The Horde neighborhood had lots of iteration as people tested and weren't psyched about it. It used to be drier and dustier, especially in the southwest portion.
• As players did weird and unexpected things, the team didn't want to fix them. Windows weren't intended to be transparent on one side.
• The team has been very open communicating about housing, posting stuff early, etc. There are no plans to change how they communicate. Feedback is valuable.

Progression and Decor Acquisition

• It was important that players feel proud about the things that they are building and a sense of achievement. In other games, if you go and buy 100 of something with one click because you have the gold (or buy one and place unlimited of the item) it doesn't feel as good. The team added what they felt was the right level of friction when buying decor items from a vendor.
• The team worked hard to make sure that you can earn a lot of cool things and if you put in the effort you can get a lot more of those things. If you want to cover a room with lamps, you should feel proud that you did the work to earn them.
• If the team let you obtain decor once and place as many as you want, that would make crafting decor less useful. If they only made crafted items require earning multiple copies, then they would have had to split the UX and that doesn't feel great either.
• For a long time, you were only going to get a single copy of decor earned from achievements. Players provided feedback that they wanted multiple copies of an item, say Onxyia's head. The team had to figure out how to make that possible and feel good.
• There is a decent amount of decor that you'll have even as a fresh player, some to buy cheaply in the neighborhood, and if you are an existing player you'll get some retroactively from things like achievements and quests.
• You should be able to get to Housing Level 5 in early access. Level 2 is basically free, it's from the tutorial.
• Players that have been playing for a while might get up to Level 3 when they log in. Getting to level 4 from there won't be too much effort.

Neighborhood Mechanics & Social Features

• Once neighborhood endeavors are underway after Midnight Release, you'll get some decor from Community Coupons.
• Right now, 80% of the plots need to be claimed in a neighborhood to add a subdivision. If people move between them, you'll need to be 80% full between both subdivisions to get another. This could be changed at any point.
• Neighborhoods should be more on the full size.
• The team doesn't want people to feel like they miss out on housing things if they don't play for a few weeks. You can visit a friend's neighborhood, take your coupons there, and take advantage of what is going on there. If you don't want to visit other neighborhoods, endeavors will cycle through again.
• You'll have lots of reasons to visit cities still, lots of things aren't in the neighborhoods.

Future Content & Customization

• Night Elf and Blood Elf exteriors are coming with the launch of Midnight.
• Unlikely that we'll see opposite faction exteriors in a neighborhood. Maybe something neutral. You'll likely see players making opposite faction exteriors out of parts.
• The team has talked about cozy activities that neighborhoods could and should have, but it'll come down to what players want. Fishing makes a lot of sense. If the players want it, the team can talk about it.
• The Daylight circle rooms are coming in Midnight. The team is looking at adding multiple doorways to the rooms, but they haven't figured it out just yet.
• The team is likely going to add all the stuff people obviously want. Placing pets, hanging armor on a rack, hanging your sword on the wall, and more.

Technical Constraints & UI

• The team would love to raise the exterior budget cap, but right now there is a technical constraint. They have testing that looks at what players could do in the worst case and they want the worst case performance experience to be acceptable. The cap will be raised as they can do so.
• The team is taking note of feedback, lots of quality of life improvement ideas for the housing UI UX. There's a button in the top left of the UI that is disabled right now related to inspecting decor, but it'll be very helpful once they get it working.

Player Housing - ScreenRant Dev Interview
ScreenRant also had the chance to talk to Ion Hazzikostas, Jesse Kurlancheek, Principal Game Designer, Joanna Gianulis, Senior UX Designer, Jay Hwang, Principal Artist, & Garth DeAngelis, Associate Production Director.

Be sure to check out the interview, as it has exclusive concept art and a decorating video!

• From early on the team knew that everyone would be getting a house and that the feature had to be very accessible and approachable.
• Decorating had to be easy and intuitive, serving all types of players, including those with accessibility needs.
• The goal was to get players from Exiles Reach to housing as fast as possible. As soon as you get off the boat on the first island, you'll be asked if you want to keep doing Exiles Reach or go to housing.
• One dream that was mentioned is allowing players to give out their own decor as a reward to other players. Maybe as a reward for completing their parkour course.
• Ion liked Legion the best of previous expansion, but he thinks Midnight may top it.
• Ion guessed that there are an equal number of players playing LFR as their primary form of raiding, as players that do Normal, Heroic, and Mythic combined.
• Players have gotten more efficient at playing WoW and share more information than they did in the past, so it'd be tough to go back to an era of slowing things down.

Player Housing - Shacknews Dev Interview
Shacknews has the opportunity to talk to Principal Game Director Jesse Kurlancheek and Senior UX Designer Joanna Gianulis.

• It should be as easy as it is in real life to move a chair a little bit in housing.
• The team is eager to keep pushing up the indoor decor cap.
• There are a lot of old art assets that need a little work before they can be added, such as trees that were meant to be placed into the ground having no bottom. Other things have no textures on the back, such as windows that are transparent when flipped around.
• The Frozen Throne isn't a throne, it's part of the mountain/arena. The team would have to go and extract it from the world model and texture/model the back.
• Items from 20 years ago are incredibly low resolution / low poly, which means they need some work before players can have them.
• Right now the team is focused on getting housing out and listening to feedback.
• What is a guild hall? An apartment building where everyone has some space? A giant hall where everyone comes together? What will the guild do with the space?
• Houses will default to private, but yards default to anyone in the neighborhood can enter.
• There aren't any player power benefits to housing. The team doesn't want to force anyone to do content they aren't interested in.
• The team had a conversation early on about letting people be landlords and charging rent. The team wants WoW housing to be free of the problematic parts of real housing.
• The concept of letting players be an interior decorator is on the team's radar.
• The neighborhood NPCs will react to rain.
• Players being able to share housing rooms or designs would be very valuable. It won't be in at launch.