Exterior Decor Cap Raised to 250, Houses Can Now Be Raised, Dark Heart of Galakrond

[chaud]

Housing Exterior Decor Cap Raised to 250 for Level 3+ Houses
A hotfix went out this morning to raise the exterior decor cap to 250 for Level 3 houses.

Houses Can Now Be Raised
Players can now more easily raise their houses. You'll need to go into advanced mode and click where the up arrow should be to raise it. The arrow won't appear until you click where it should be.

Drained Dark Heart of Galakrond Fixed
The Drained Dark Heart of Galakrond is now properly awarded for players that have earned the Worldsoul-Searching achievement.

Housing Development Notes -- Updated December 9

Maintenance is complete for this week, and we have two development notes for Housing.

Up

Almost immediately after the 11.2.7 patch went live, we saw players using keybinds to elevate houses off the ground, even though there weren’t UI controls for that. We quickly began work to enable the controls so that it would be easier to move a house upward.

We have two concerns, of course:

• The underside of houses aren’t modeled or textured. Players who lift their houses may decide to hide that part behind other things.
• If you lift your house up, clicking on the door could become difficult. You might want to consider building a ramp or a jumping puzzle or a mount landing spot, etc.

“I have just met you, and I love you.”

Inside Out

One of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve gotten over the past few weeks was that the exterior decor budget felt too restrictive. The was intentionally set to 200 to address performance concerns.

Now that we have some data from live servers to look at, we’re happy to conclude that we can increase this limit by 25%. At House level 3, the exterior decor limit will increase from 200 to 250.

We’ll continue to monitor everything, keeping an eye on performance impacts (especially as other features are added to Housing) and adjust accordingly.

“She has great new friends, a great new house. Things couldn’t be better.”

[Ghostile]

250 is a good start, but we can do better.

[Zerora]

Cool that you can raise your house now. Would be awesome if new decor items where released to build a proper foundation for your house as well. More variety of rocks/boulders, maybe pile of soil or sand, etc...

[Cynical Asshole]

After I put down all the boulders required to turn the house into a cave, I hit the 200 exterior budget limit. Just with boulders.

[Golden Yak]

Ugh, gotta do some boring shit for that Heart... but I want it.

[Soeroah]

250 is a good start, but we can do better.

That depends entirely on the server stability.

[Nzx]

250 is not enough when decor costs the amount of points it does, the plots are so large, and the empty parts of your plot are just generic flat ground textures. You could do a lot more with 250 points if you didn't also have to do your best to hide the ground texture in any of the areas you do put things in, if the plots came with fencing options that didn't cost you decor points to build yourself, if there were 'paintbrush' options to put 3d ground clutter like flowers and grass in areas of the plot rather than making it yourself, or if some items that you need many of weren't so small. If you wanted to fence your plot with Elwynn Fence, I think it would cost very nearly your entire exterior budget and if not that, then a huge chunk of an already very tight restriction spent before you even start customizing anything.

It's a great feature, but "performance concerns" are strangling it in the cradle.

[ryan1mcq]

My exterior decor items still showing as 200 and im not getting the up arrow appearing in advanced mode to move my house upwards, anyoneone else?

[Futuredanish]

You WILL spend every free second you have in wow. Blizzard does not want their customers to even think about playing another game. I've seen a lot of people attracted to the new housing feature only to give up cause a lot of decor is locked behind reps and meta achieves and whatnot.

[Eapoe]

You WILL spend every free second you have in wow. Blizzard does not want their customers to even think about playing another game. I've seen a lot of people attracted to the new housing feature only to give up cause a lot of decor is locked behind reps and meta achieves and whatnot.

You forgot to add that some thing are not retroactive, too, like the troop recruitment from Legion.

[chaud]

My exterior decor items still showing as 200 and im not getting the up arrow appearing in advanced mode to move my house upwards, anyoneone else?

If you are EU, it'll come tomorrow with maintenance most likely.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It is nice that they added another 50 points a week after release but it is still nowhere near enough to build a fence around the property or to place many bushes or build additional structures. Hopefully they will keep raising the point limit each week every week until at least 500 points or so. It will be disappointing if they require having housing level 4 or 5 or something with Endeavors not available to farm housing exp. It is not a good expenditure of my time to go around doing questlines, rep grinds, raid farms yet again, etc, just to get a few housing items for 10 exp each. Hopefully the AH prices of crafted decor will continue to go down but you are looking at dumping millions of gil to get exp from that which isn't economical either. I don't see anyway to reach level 6 and unlock the large room before Midnight launches and the house exp daily/weekly quests become available.

[Lahis]

It is nice that they added another 50 points a week after release but it is still nowhere near enough to build a fence around the property or to place many bushes or build additional structures. Hopefully they will keep raising the point limit each week every week until at least 500 points or so. It will be disappointing if they require having housing level 4 or 5 or something with Endeavors not available to farm housing exp. It is not a good expenditure of my time to go around doing questlines, rep grinds, raid farms yet again, etc, just to get a few housing items for 10 exp each. Hopefully the AH prices of crafted decor will continue to go down but you are looking at dumping millions of gil to get exp from that which isn't economical either. I don't see anyway to reach level 6 and unlock the large room before Midnight launches and the house exp daily/weekly quests become available.

They are doing it intentionally slowly because they don't want the servers to crash and burn when everyone puts ten thousand items on their yards.

[Doffen]

You forgot to add that some thing are not retroactive, too, like the troop recruitment from Legion.

And that last one sucks. Probably made 3-400+ troops on all 12 classes(did all 12 in Legion back then) and now I have to log all 12 like 4-6 times each over 2-4 days

Reminds me of all the gold I raked in through the app lol

[Ghostile]

You WILL spend every free second you have in wow. Blizzard does not want their customers to even think about playing another game. I've seen a lot of people attracted to the new housing feature only to give up cause a lot of decor is locked behind reps and meta achieves and whatnot.

I have never and I will never understand the thought process that if something isn't available with zero effort, it means you must sit grinding it out until it is done instead of doing it bit by bit when you care, and then blaming the devs for forcing you to play the game 18 hours a day for a week like time management wasn't your personal responsibility.

[Skildar]

nice disney references

[Nymrohd]

And that last one sucks. Probably made 3-400+ troops on all 12 classes(did all 12 in Legion back then) and now I have to log all 12 like 4-6 times each over 2-4 days

Reminds me of all the gold I raked in through the app lol

Yeah, took about three days to get all my troops killed so I could recruit new ones which felt so weird.

[Kaleredar]

It is nice that they added another 50 points a week after release but it is still nowhere near enough to build a fence around the property or to place many bushes or build additional structures. Hopefully they will keep raising the point limit each week every week until at least 500 points or so. It will be disappointing if they require having housing level 4 or 5 or something with Endeavors not available to farm housing exp. It is not a good expenditure of my time to go around doing questlines, rep grinds, raid farms yet again, etc, just to get a few housing items for 10 exp each. Hopefully the AH prices of crafted decor will continue to go down but you are looking at dumping millions of gil to get exp from that which isn't economical either. I don't see anyway to reach level 6 and unlock the large room before Midnight launches and the house exp daily/weekly quests become available.

The waning wood fence is a single-point item that’s like five fence segments in one; that’d be an easy way to make a rather large fence pretty easily.

[Eapoe]

I have never and I will never understand the thought process that if something isn't available with zero effort, it means you must sit grinding it out until it is done instead of doing it bit by bit when you care, and then blaming the devs for forcing you to play the game 18 hours a day for a week like time management wasn't your personal responsibility.

I can’t speak for the other person but, to expand on it a bit with a potentially slightly off topic portion, part of the issue is a lot of this stuff is gated behind things we’ve already done hundreds of times. If not more in some cases.
I’ve played since WotLK. You know how many times I’ve run the dungeons and raids from every xpac when it was current? Do you know how many times I’ve run them since they weren’t to farm achieves and missed tmogs, mounts, and pets? Do you know how many troops I recruited for my class halls across about 6 classes? Do you know these were all done in my given time for my hobby? These are rhetorical by the way and I don’t expect a genuine answer.
Now, here comes Blizzard. Some achievements are not retroactive, meaning we have to do things we’ve already done again. We have a new crafting reagent that drops in 1-3 increments (anecdotally about 80% give me 1 per node), and to craft everything probably costs in the thousands. I have to recruit troops all over again. I have to run dungeons I’ve already completed multiple times over the years from being current, cosmetic farming (WotLK pets as an example), Timewalking, challenge modes, mythic plus, and recently the Timewalking event near Caverns of Time. The good thing is that if you only need 1 you can just one-and-done the instance, but you need to run it multiple times to get the same piece multiple times.

All these things add up and seem rather daunting. Which is also kind of silly given how Blizzard has used things seeming that way as bad design (paraphrasing), if I remember correctly. Mainly talking about class/spec design.
So yes, while you are correct in that getting these things can be done gradually over time, Blizzard has implemented a system that requires high gameplay time to get things quickly for what you want to do. Especially when considering these are things to do outside of time you’ve already allotted to the game for other things.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not putting 100% of the blame on Blizzard as it is ultimately on the player, but that does not mean Blizzard isn’t partially responsible for the game design and how it influences player behavior. Hell, they literally made a loading screen tooltip basically telling people to go touch grass because of it.

[mbit2]

I have never and I will never understand the thought process that if something isn't available with zero effort, it means you must sit grinding it out until it is done instead of doing it bit by bit when you care, and then blaming the devs for forcing you to play the game 18 hours a day for a week like time management wasn't your personal responsibility.

Minecraft has creative mode because it understands many have no interest in wasting their life grinding garbage to be allowed to play the building part. It really shouldn't surprise anyone that there is a sizeable amount of people who reject gating housing behind grinding old dead content.