Retail WoW & Me in 2025

What with the 80/20 split in play time mentioned in my previous post, it seems hard to deny that I'm more of a retail player now, even if it still feels weird to me. I still prefer the way many things work in Classic, but with retail being the mode that both my husband and many of my friends prefer, it's easy for me to end up spending more time there.

I'll have to change the way I do the character round-ups this time, since we got the new warband character selection screens this year! It's technically still possible to take individual shots of each character by dragging them out of their groupings, but that's too much extra effort for me, so I'll just follow the groupings I've created for myself in this post as well.

Oh, and I've decided that I'm not going to get into Legion Remix at all in this post. I'll just note that I created twelve new characters for it, most of whom have had very little play time, have no professions (since those are disabled in Remix) and I don't quite know yet what I'm going to do with them going forward. I intend to make a separate post about that whole experience later down the line. Meanwhile, let's look at the best of the rest:

Mains

My main warband screen contains the four characters that I've played the most throughout the year.

Milita - Quel'Thalas

• Level 80 draenei warrior
• 16 days, 16 hours /played (+11 days, 23 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Blacksmithing (+17), 100 Mining, 48 Cooking (+12), 139 Fishing (+91)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 66 Outland Blacksmithing (+66), 15 Cataclysm Blacksmithing (+15),  5 Kul Tiran Blacksmithing (+5), 58 Dragon Isles Blacksmithing (+58), 300 Classic Mining (+5), 75 Outland Mining (+75), 75 Cataclysm Mining (+62), 28 Pandaria Mining (+28), 14 Kul Tiran Mining (+14), 100 Dragon Isles Mining (+100), 7 Outland Fishing (+7), 4 Kul Tiran Fishing (+4), 7 Archaeology (+7) 

Towards the end of last year, the warrior I levelled in MoP Remix was still kind of transitioning into being my new main, but 2025 was definitely her year entirely, as no other character came close to accumulating even half as much play time. At the start of the year I was still tanking M+ dungeons for guildies, but I dropped M+ entirely at the end of season one, for a variety of reasons. I continued to have lots of fun duoing delves with the husband though, which probably took up the majority of our time. I also did some work on professions though, some of which I talked about in this post. (No, that second Thunderfury binding still hasn't dropped.)

Shindragosa - Azjol-Nerub

• Level 80 dracthyr evoker
• 27 days, 2 hours /played (+2 days, 13 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Leatherworking (+17), 100 Skinning, 100 Cooking (+27), 250 Fishing (+106)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): Legion Leatherworking 3 (+3), 218 Classic Skinning (+89), 69 Outland Skinning (+8), 5 Pandaria Skinning (+5), 31 Draenor Skinning (+31), 100 Legion Skinning (+15), 36 Kul Tiran Skinning (+6), 31 Kul Tiran Fishing (+1)

I still feel attached to my Dragonflight main because I loved that expansion so much, but she got the least play time of the four characters in this group because preservation evoker just hasn't felt good to play for me ever since War Within dropped. It's not terrible, it's just felt slightly off all expansion, leading me to prioritise my priest whenever I felt like healing.

Tilarea - AN

• Level 80 lightforged draenei priest
• 12 days, 9 hours /played (+4 days)
• War Within professions: 100 Tailoring (+35), 100 Enchanting (+39), 39 Cooking (+18), 88 Fishing (+15)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 75 Northrend Tailoring (+44), 75 Cataclysm Tailoring (+30), 76 Dragon Isles Tailoring (+2), 300 Classic Enchanting (+204), 51 Outland Enchanting (+25), 25 Cataclysm Enchanting (+10), 78 Dragon Isles Enchanting (+4)

... this being the aforementioned priest. She remains that character that serves no particular purpose in our little group's adventures; I just really like playing holy priest sometimes. I also did some real work on her professions this year, levelling up enchanting and tailoring skills from several old expansions. 

Shinfur - Earthen Ring

• Level 80 pandaren monk
• 4 days, 20 hours /played (+3 days, 16 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Engineering (+17), 36 Cooking (+30), 63 Fishing (+59)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 12 Classic Mining (+12), 7 Legion Mining (+7), 3 Classic Engineering (+3), 5 Outland Engineering (+5), 6 Draenor Cooking (+6) 

The monk I levelled during MoP Remix ended up supplanting my human monk from Shadowlands somehow, maybe because I'd levelled the latter primarily as a healer while this one gets played as windwalker all the time. She's the one dps character I have on whom I feel moderately competent and who was also the one on whom I beat Zekvir's Lair on ?? difficulty.

Melee dps alts

I've had kind of mixed feelings about my melee dps alts all year. I mostly decided at one point that I wanted to have one of every class at 80, plus more alts allowed me to work on more professions. But when push comes to shove, I only have so much time to grind delves or whatever other gameplay to gear up, which was mostly invested in the mains, meaning all of these ladies came out only now and then whenever the mood struck me.

Mehg - AN

• Level 80 night elf demon hunter (+8)
• 12 days, 12 hours /played (+1 day, 15 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining (+70), 100 Jewelcrafting (+75), 40 Cooking (+40), 53 Fishing (+53)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 290 Classic Mining (+274), 39 Outland Mining (+39), 44 Cataclysm Mining (+17), 11 Classic Jewelcrafting (+11) 

Hekatie - ER

• Level 80 undead death knight
• 12 days, 16 hours /played (+17 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Inscription (+29), 43 Cooking (+13), 63 Fishing (+21)
• Other professions: no changes this year

Groghue - AN

• Level 80 worgen rogue
• 3 days, 15 hours /played (+17 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism (+13), 105 Skinning (+35), 25 Cooking (+25), 12 Fishing (+12)
• Other professions: no changes this year 

Isadora - Norgannon 

• Level 80 human paladin (+61)
• 3 days, 8 hours /played (+1 day, 10 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 44 Blacksmithing, 100 Mining, 25 Cooking, 30 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 43 Dragon Isles Blacksmithing (+43), 15 Northrend Mining (+15), 94 Dragon Isles Mining (+94), 23 Dragon Isles Cooking (+23)

The paladin (who was the very first character I ever created, located on a German server) probably had the most interesting journey as I decided to level her up on a whim during a Winds of Mysterious Fortune event. 

Ranged dps alts

Yes, that's right, there's only three of these! I guess there's a job opening here for whenever I hit level 80 on another ranged class.

Tharisa - AN

• Level 80 human hunter
• 5 days, 19 hours /played (+1 day, 4 hours)
• War Within professions: 88 Leatherworking (+32), 100 Skinning, 32 Cooking (+6), 53 Fishing (+20)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 20 Outland Skinning (+14), 53 Legion Skinning (+4)

Hunter is a class I kind of want to like and play more since I loved classic hunters so much, but for some reason Blizzard just keeps making the retail version of the class worse and worse. I still think that turning survival into a melee spec in Legion was a mistake, and trying to take MM hunters' pets away in War Within just to appease raiders was even worse. They just don't seem to have any kind of clue what hunter players want from the class, and this reddit post on the subject I saw this year really resonated with me.

Willowie - QT

• Level 80 human warlock (+6)
• 1 day, 16 hours /played (+1 day, 3 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Alchemy (+52), 100 Herbalism (+38), 37 Cooking, 45 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only) 2 Classic Alchemy (+2), 11 Classic Herbalism

My perception of warlock gameplay tends to oscillate between "this is terrible" and "wait, this is fun" but then Blizzard changes something again, I get confused and lose interest again. This is the warlock I levelled in MoP Remix by the way. 

Daerys - Darkspear

• Level 80 draenei mage (+10)
• 31 days, 6 hours /played (+21 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 100 Mining, 53 Jewelcrafting, 25 Cooking, 1 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 4 Legion Mining (+4), 6 Legion Jewelcrafting (+6) 

Honestly, I just levelled this one so I would finally have all classes at 80. And so someone could wear the banging tier one mage transmog once I'd finally completed the set. 

Tank and healer alts

Yeah, so... I already have a tank and two healers in my "mains" group, how much time could I realistically have left for these guys? They just exist for the occasional change of pace at this point. 

Berrine - QT

• Level 80 night elf druid
• 2 days, 16 hours /played (+1 day, 5 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Skinning, 1 Cooking, 32 Fishing (+16)
• Other professions: no changes this year

I'll say that my bear druid came close at one point to getting some more play time, after I kind of ran out of things to upgrade on my warrior main, but for the rest of the year Blizzard was very good at drip-feeding me just one more upgrade over and over again, which kept me chugging away at the warrior until the very end of most seasons. 

Helena - Darkspear

• Level 80 dwarf paladin
• 4 days, 12 hours /played (+22 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 9 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 7 Northrend Mining (+4), 300 Classic Skinning, 28 Northrend Skinning (+16), 56 Archaeology (+6)

Shimeri - AN

• Level 80 dwarf shaman (+10)
• 5 days, 2 hours /played (+18 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 93 Alchemy, 100 Herbalism, 25 Cooking, 1 Fishing
• Other professions: none 

Recent levellers

The last grouping I'm going to feature here is... a bit of a lie, because none of these have actually been levelled "recently". They had been when I named the group though. 

Surly - QT

• Level 25 blood elf hunter
• 5 hours played
• Professions: none

Surly was originally created because I had picked up a "bound to warband" polearm that I thought would be good for a survival hunter. Not that I ever levelled her that far. Instead I just got a bit of a first impression of melee survival (extremely clunky in the first few levels) and got to revisit the blood elf starting zone (pretty nostalgic). She was also my first test subject for doing Lorewalking on a low-level character.

Spinny - QT 

• Level 21 goblin monk
• 3 hours played
• Professions: 34 Classic Herbalism, 20 Cataclysm Skinning

Spinny was created so I could refresh my knowledge of goblin lore before the release of Undermine. After that I couldn't quite decide where to level next and ended up going nowhere.

Tidella - AN

• Level 55 Kul Tiran shaman (+1)
• 2 days, 1 hour /played (+4 hours)
• Professions (changed from 2024 only): 292 Classic Mining (+186), 9 Cataclysm Mining (+6), 245 Classic Engineering (+105) 

When I first looked up this character I was like "what, I gained a level, I didn't think I even played this character this year" but then I checked the profession stats and oh right, I guess I worked on her Classic mining and engineering at some point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also ran:

No more warband screens, just two more characters for whom I noted down some minor changes: 

Shinlu - AN

• Level 71 human monk (+3)
• 22 days, 16 hours /played (+2 hours)
• Professions (changed from 2024 only): 12 War Within Skinning (+12)

Again, I hardly remember playing my old monk from Shadowlands this year, but apparently she gained three levels. I think I took her to Khaz Algar and did a couple of easy delves to explore more variants back before they made it so you can see the delve variant of the day on the map.

Eartha - AN

• Level 52 earthen shaman (+26)
• 8 hours /played (+6)
• Professions: none 

Finally, this character! I mentioned last year that I'd created her to benefit from the earthen racial bonus to exploration XP and that I was going to write about that... but then I didn't. We'll see whether I eventually get around to it or not.

Classic WoW & Me in 2025

2025 has been another unexciting year for WoW Classic and me, as my play time dropped even further year on year. Based on ManicTime's numbers, only about 20% of my overall time spent playing WoW this year was spent in some flavour of Classic, while retail got the lion's share with roughly 80%.

This was already a trend last year, and I noted back then that "my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me". That surprise didn't happen, and the wider Classic community is still sitting on pins and needles waiting for some kind of announcement about what's coming next. I was therefore not super motivated to play Classic myself, but I did dip into different modes for a few weeks at a time over the course of the year.

Cataclysm Classic/Mists of Pandaria Classic

When MoP Classic was announced, I decided that I wanted to get back in there just to explore the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms that is no longer accessible in retail. Since I had last played my hunter back in Classic BC, I had some levelling to do first, but the abridged nostalgia tour through Wrath and Cataclysm content was pretty fun. Pandaria itself actually ended up being the place where I stalled since having to work my way through seemingly all the quests again just to get from 85 to 90 when I'd only just done them for MoP Remix last year was simply too much. I did finally go back and hit 90 last week though. 

Tiirr - Mirage Raceway 

• Level 90 Hunter (+20)
• 61 days, 6 hours played (+6 days, 22 hours since 2021, though not all of that would have been this past year. I did still play her a bit at the start of 2022 but then dropped BC Classic so hard that I didn't even take any notes on where I left it.)
• 600 Skinning (+225), 595 Leatherworking (+220), 596 Cooking (+221, with some progress in all the Pandaren Cuisine "ways": 535 Grill, 555 Wok, 555 Pot, 535 Steamer, 554 Oven, 591 Brew), 598 Fishing (+223), 600 First Aid (+225)

Faly - MR

• Level 71 Druid (+1)
• 19 days, 1 hour played (+5 days, 8 hours since 2021 but same deal as with the hunter)
• 386 Herbalism (+11), 380 Alchemy (Elixir Master, +12), 380 Cooking (+5), 382 Fishing (+126), 380 First Aid (+12)

Turtle WoW

Turtle WoW was the surprise curveball I didn't expect, as I had no plans to ever play on a private server ever again. However, the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them at the end of July inspired me to download their client just to check it out before they'd be forced to shut down. (They're still up and running five months later by the way, though they were forced to move to a new domain and cancelled their Unreal Engine project so it's an ongoing battle in more than one way.) I did get pulled away and back into retail before hitting level 40, but I haven't written it off yet as long as the servers remain up. 

Tiranea - Nordanaar

• Level 38 Hunter
• 4 days, 3 hours played 
• 201 Jewelcrafting, 226 Mining, 225 Cooking, 205 Fishing, 212 First Aid, 98 Survival (Many tents! Handle it!)

Season of Discovery

At the start of the year, my interest in Season of Discovery had just seen a resurgence and I did play there for a couple of months. But as detailed in this post, Incursions seemed to weirdly break my spirit and then I just never went back to play again. 

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 49 Priest
• 4 days, 5 hours played (+1 day, 6 hours)
• 245 Alchemy (+57), 280 Herbalism (+75), 225 Cooking (+21), 258 First Aid (+57), 237 Fishing (+63)

Shindig - WG

• Level 31 Mage
• 1 day, 4 hours played (+4 hours)
• 102 Enchanting (+5), 185 Tailoring (+60), 103 Cooking, 90 First Aid (+15), 75 Fishing 

Classic era

At the end of the year I also finally stopped logging into Classic era altogether. Somewhat weirdly, the thing that ended up breaking my streak was (lack of) Felcloth supply on the auction house. I'd kept logging in regularly to at least make a small contribution to the community by transmuting Mooncloth every few days, but at some point Felcloth either stopped appearing on the AH at all, or it was so stupidly priced that buying it to transmute would have resulted in a loss. I took my human mage out to do some farming of my own for exactly one play session and then decided that screw it, this wasn't worth the effort to me. I also didn't log into hardcore even once this year.

Just noting down what little play time I did accumulate from crafting and such for potential future reference:

• Shika - Pyrewood Village: 34 days, 2 hours played (+10 hours)
• Shintau - PV: 8 days, 20 hours played (+2 hours)
• Shinny - PV: 5 days, 3 hours played (+13 hours)
• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 12 hours (+3 hours)
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 23 hours (+7 hours)

Everyone seems to be in agreement that next year, Blizzard will have to have some interesting new reveal about Classic coming - we'll see how that will affect my interest in this mode! 

Level 90 in MoP Classic: What Is This Place?

The other night I felt like playing a little bit of Lemix before bedtime but for some reason all the retail servers were down. I heard mutterings about a DDoS attack? Either way, to get my fix of the particular flavour of WoW grinding that I craved at the time, I instead fired up MoP Classic for the first time in a few months.

The devs went pretty wild with server merges since I last played. Fortunately Mirage Raceway is still the same as it was, so I didn't have to move my characters yet again. I do appreciate that they finally put an end to the farce that were all those single-faction PvP realms and converted them all to PvE. Now there are no more PvP servers in the EU version of MoP Classic at all, while the US only got to keep its lone holdout Grobbolus, the RP-PvP server where people actually cared about community and things other than griefing and therefore managed to maintain a somewhat balanced population. Can we finally stop pretending that the masses crave world PvP now?

I've said it before, but logging into MoP Classic feels weird every time. When I've just been playing Vanilla, it feels strange and too modern. What are all these buttons? Where is my ammo? But when I've been playing retail recently it's the opposite and actually feels quite nostalgic with its enforced ground travel while levelling and a hunter skill rotation that doesn't feel like total crap. 

When I last abandoned my hunter in Pandaria, I was mired in how tedious it felt to level to 90 (even if I wrongly noted it down as levelling from 84 to 85 in this post). I guess that just underlines how meaningless that stretch of levelling felt, just an endless bar going nowhere and taking forever to fill up. Since then, I think the XP required has been nerfed, or maybe the XP rewarded from kills and quests has been boosted - maybe even both. Either way it didn't feel too bad to work my way through that final level via a mix of questing in Kun-Lai Summit and doing chores for the Klaxxi.

 

Fun fact: While doing this, I also installed MoP Classic on my laptop, and even though Classic has been in the Mists era for more than five months now, the shortcut it created on my desktop was still called "Cataclysm Classic". Small indie gaming company and all that. 

I should be able to conclude my Project Vale soon, and we'll see what else I'll feel up to now that max level has unlocked a few more options in terms of content.

MoP Classic is quite an enigma to me in some respects. Both Redbeard and Wilhelm were grousing recently that Blizzard seemed to show little consideration for the anniversary servers transitioning into Burning Crusade, considering how closely in time the devs scheduled the TBC pre-patch to Midnight's in retail. And I don't think that perception is wrong, but I think people also have a skewed idea of where the core of the Classic population sits. Wherever I see people talking about Classic in general, it's usually about the Vanilla anniversary servers, but based on ironforge.pro at least, that's not where most of the people are! For all the talk about how few people wanted it, the numbers show MoP Classic still sporting the biggest population of them all (over 100k weekly raiders), bigger than anniversary (~60k weekly raiders), the remains of SoD and Classic era put together.

I know raiding stats aren't everything and it sure seems weird considering that MoP Classic has no buzz around it whatsoever, but it's not unheard of for lots of people to play in quiet contentment without making headlines. It really does make me wonder about that Warlords of Draenor Classic though. I keep thinking that surely that's got to be where the Classic progression train stops, but if the majority of Classic players are happy to just quietly chug along through all the old expansions that Blizzard will give them, even the ones that weren't that beloved back in the day, maybe it's still a worthwhile thing for them to do? I guess we'll find out one way or another next year.

Starting to Wrap Up Legion Remix

Legion Remix has less than four weeks left to run, and I'm slowly starting to think about how to wrap things up. The phased approach Blizzard has been taking with Lemix makes the whole experience a bit odd, as they added a couple of quests with the release of the last phase that are all about how the timeline is collapsing and we need to say goodbye! Except then we still had more than a month left at that point.

I've ticked off all the Lemix-specific achievements except for needing to level four more classes to 80, and there's one lesser invasion point commander that keeps eluding me. Not much to be done about that last one other than going back to Argus over and over again for another roll at the dice.

The whole "levelling all the characters" experience has been nothing but wacky. By character four or five, thanks to the stacking XP bonus, it was no longer a matter of timerunning but more like... time-tumbling. XP was just happening to me. You could no longer call it "earning" experience by any stretch of the imagination. Even with every quest rewarding a gear box, the constantly rising levels made it impossible to keep up with even the game's most basic gear requirements, and the last leg of each levelling journey was once again a painful struggle even in normal world tier as I tried to kill things with gear that's thirty levels too low for the intended difficulty. Your best bet at that point is to hope for an easy carry through some random dungeons and raids, which does work a lot of the time (it only takes one extremely OP person in the group) but not always. Not exactly my idea of fun, which is one of the reasons I've been stalling on the last four characters. But I'm still working on it.

Most other achievements have been easy and unremarkable enough. Do all the quests once, do all the dungeons once etc. I did want to take note of a few that stood out though.

First there was "Building a Heroic Army", which required you to earn 200 points in Withered Army training in heroic world tier. The trick there is that your Withered don't scale at all and are basically a bunch of fragile little dudes that will die almost instantly if any mob so much as sneezes at them. This turns the whole thing into a challenge of avoiding mobs that do AoE damage and/or that take a while to kill, while guiding your little "army" through the area in a way that allows you to more or less one-shot any opponents you encounter so they don't have a chance to hurt your guys.

I only really engaged with the Withered Army Training briefly during my first run through Legion, meaning I was vaguely familiar with the system but with no real understanding of the details. I had quite a bit of fun running through normal difficulty a few times to learn the lay of the land and collect the various upgrade chests (even if it's my understanding that these don't really make a difference on heroic mode either). Once I finally felt like I knew what I was doing it only took me two or three more tries to get it right and I felt quite accomplished for finding a good route.

The other achievement that truly excited me was the one to either earn 999 ranks of the inifinte power progression or beat a M+ dungeon on level 49 or higher. I didn't think I was likely to have the motivation to grind out the power ranks (even at the time of me writing this, my Lemix main is only sitting in the 300s), but the M+ way seemed achievable. Together with the husband and a guildie we slowly increased our key level over the weeks as our power levels increased.

Ironically, at the higher key levels I saw way more boss mechanics than I've ever seen while running any of these dungeons in other modes. We failed the timer on our first Return to Upper Karazhan because we'd gone in blind and hey, it turns out you actually need to do mechanics on Medivh!

Our worst week though was the one when we had an Eye of Azshara level 40-something, failed the timer but decided to power through to the end anyway, just to then have to abandon the key at the very end as it turned out the final boss had an unavoidable mechanic that had buggy scaling and would one-shot even players at max gear and power level. (We confirmed this on the forums after a few wipes.)

However, the very week immediately afterwards I got a really easy key, which when we timed it turned into another easy key, which finally turned into a Neltharion's Lair (another easy key) 49, which we managed to time for the achievement. That felt pretty great. 

The reason we were always three-manning was that there was unfortunately less interest in this version of Remix in our little guild than last time. For raids we could also only get three to four people together. Still, we managed to make our way through all the mythic raids including Tomb of Sargeras (Archimonde was a pain but we got him eventually).

Mythic Antorus turned out to be the final obstacle and we were pleasantly surprised that we managed both Enonar and Imonar (though the latter was a hilarious shitshow - definitely a memorable experience, especially me always having to push him through his first phase by myself while the other two were put to sleep). The unexpected dead stop came at Aggramar, since we couldn't burn through his first phase before he did his knockback, and since the strength of that move is inversely proportional to how many people it hits, the three of us were always yeeted into space the moment he used the ability.

We eventually ended up building a normal pug for it, which I simply titled "Antorus for all" (since we knew we were capable of doing most of it with the three of us anyway and just needed more bodies). People applied faster than I could click "accept". It was a fun breeze that eventually ticked off my last raid achievements too.

I'll probably want to write another full post or two about Lemix once it's over, similarly to how I did for MoP Remix. The experience of levelling all these characters and playing through their class order hall campaigns has definitely been something. It's also been another generally enlightening reminder of what worked and didn't work about Legion in general - some of which I already wrote about a few years ago, but I think I have an even clearer picture of it now.

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.