A Second Look at Housing

For all the fun I've been having with Midnight, its main new feature, player housing, has largely fallen flat for me. I made a few posts in which I talked about why, and then I moved on, because I'd rather focus on the many things that I have been enjoying.

However, I did want to use the release of 12.1 as an opportunity to take another look at housing and how it's been coming along. To be clear, nothing has been done to address the major criticisms I had with the system, but my opinions on some things have at least become a bit more nuanced.

For example, while I still don't care much about decorating, I did eventually go and decorate my house a little bit. I do enjoy collecting decorations regardless of whether I plan to use them or not - I'm the same in SWTOR; there's just something satisfying about claiming new decos and adding them to my stash. And after accumulating a certain number in WoW, it felt only natural to actually place at least a few of them. It's nothing exciting, just a basic house with some simple furniture, but I have started to feel at least a little bit of a connection to it. Even though I've reached housing level 10 from my various housing-related activities, I've stuck to the single room because I don't like the Tardis aspect of the whole thing and this way my sense of how warped the whole house is isn't too bad at least.

I do visit the neighbourhood at least once a week because in a typical case of Blizzard logic, after being extremely shy about giving the houses any utility whatsoever because they didn't want anyone to feel "forced" to use them, they also added a repeatable quest that rewards currency to gear up and requires you to go to your neighbourhood and do some simple task there every week, such as helping someone find some lost animals. It's just funny to me.

I will say that I really like the variant of the quest that asks you to attend a gathering of at least five players in a player house, because it's served as an opportunity for everyone in the guild to take turns visiting other people's houses, and there are nice spontaneous random groupings for it as well. One week when I couldn't get it done with guildies, I ended up joining a party via the group finder where someone was showing off their insanely detailed wizard tower interior - I quite enjoyed hanging around for a bit and having a look around. I also took a screenshot of my character sitting in their custom-made bathroom.

 

In general I do appreciate how much joy people who really like building and decorating purely for the sake of it get out of the system. Nobody in my immediate circle of friends is really into it, but I don't need to cast my net very wide on social media to come across players who are having an absolute blast with their house. Just take a look at the WoW Housing subreddit and get ready for your jaw to drop. I do at least get a bit of happiness by association out of that.

Oh, and remember endeavours? It did indeed not take long for Blizzard to nerf the requirements for public neighbourhoods to complete their endeavours, but the devs basically swung so hard the other way that they now basically seem to complete themselves. I just have to remember to check in at some point to collect my free housing coupons.

I do like how they make the neighbourhood look a bit different when your visitors change, though the randomisation aspect of that may still need some work. While some people were complaining that they'd already seen all the available endeavours and were now bored of them, the Grummels camped out in my public neighbourhood for three months in a row, meaning I didn't get to see anything else for a quarter of the year. When the system finally switched to Ethereals I had some fun with the jumping puzzle they added, and I'm kinda enjoying the Amani-themed one that's going on right now as well. The weird circular gift-giving thing with Griftah made my head spin a little but I was proud that I was able to figure out all the relevant neighbourhood NPCs organically. 

I reckon overall, housing is probably shaping up to be a success for Blizzard - the "usage" metrics must be decent thanks to the weekly quest for gear rewards, and I'm sure all the decor they've added to the shop has made for some nice supplementary income for the game. Housing enthusiasts in MMOs always seem to be quite happy to spend on the cash shop without complaining too much.