Just a commentary on where I find myself personally.
Lots of stuff makes me just sit there and look at the room I’m trying to build out or edit, and think… meh… not today.
1 - the bugs such as the Dark/Light/Medium problem, which have been around for months without so much as a peep from Blizz
2 - not being able to edit some parts of layouts without blowing up everything and starting from scratch
3 - a lot of the awaited Midnight decor from crafting having ridiculous ingredients that slow down the production, make items stupid expensive on the AH, etc.
4 - not being able to duplicate a lot of the new Silvermoon aesthetic while it’s fresh on my mind (the darker rooms with lots of low glow effects, the purple-gray marble in some areas, etc), which also stretches back to the Suramar aesthetic
5 - the outdoor limits still being stingy, and the light issue still lingering
6 - the lack of “domestic” items that would make a house feel like a home, the kitchen utensils and dishes, the towels, clothing and shoes to hang up or strew about, etc
7 - the seemingly inconsistent depth and locations where we can sink or merge items into walls and floors
8 - not having access to the full layout and placement budget needed for at least another month
It’s missing a social component for me. Going to the neighborhoods and seeing them dead helped kill the vibe.
Having some fun stuff to do in the neighborhoods would go a long way towards keeping the excitement going.
There is also a ton of new content that I haven’t even gotten to yet, personally. So treating housing like a long-term project that I may revisit at a later time.
I have faith that a lot of these things will be ironed out as time goes on, but a lot of it, for the time being, is going to be on us.
If you manage to get into a neighborhood with some active housing enthusiasts, plan events! I know i’d like to set up a neighborhood hide and seek (builder-hider neighborhood-seekers), and some other various events.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’ll be fun for the time being!
I wouldn’t say that I’m losing steam. I’m just waiting.
I have ideas for more rooms but I need to level up my house more.
I want to do more to the exterior but I can’t do much unless the budget goes up or they allow the ‘indoor-only’ items outside.
I want to craft decor but I need to level up my midnight professions (and the characters to do them on), I need get the materials (Midnight wood is slow going), and I need to also level up some professions for SL & DF to be able to craft those items, and I need to gather more materials for the older content as well.
I want to unlock more of the Midnight decor and get the Marl to buy extra of some of the items. That will take time since I’m working on a number of goals right now and I can’t really use a lot of the items until my house level goes up anyways.
I need some more of the older content items for the current rooms I am working on so I need to farm more currency to buy them.
Oh, the one I forgot… not being able to put the outdoor type of house in the “other” neighborhood.
Kaz’s house really needs that “witch in the woods” vibe, which means it needs to be in Founders Point, up at plot 21.
So that puts “the lodge” in Razorwind… where I have a choice of a pile of mud and metal and tusks… or Silvermoon… neither of which fits grand hunting lodge feel of the gathering place for my warband.
Yeah, this is a problem. Either you can do cool exterior builds, or you can garden.
I’m lucky, I guess, in that they added the Night Elf exteriors, so I don’t have to spend all my exterior budget on making the house look right. But making the garden look right on the 250 budget is a challenge all on its own.
I garden IRL and spend a lot of time thinking about plantings, garden design, and landscape architecture. I guess the other good news for me is that it’s finally getting to be spring and I’ll be spending a lot of time on my RL habitat instead of being cooped up indoors trying to make a garden in WoW.
I’m going to strongly disagree with the idea that housing shouldn’t be treated as a seasonal thing like other parts of the game.
Just as there are hardcore raiders that play to raid and if there isn’t a new raid on the horizon for them they complain and stop playing, there are now also hardcore housing enthusiasts that are only playing because of housing.
Blizzard opened a can of worms when it introduced one of the best housing systems in gaming history, they now need to feed those worms. There are hardcore housing players sitting in level 9 houses right now wondering what is next, and are staring into a void of silence wondering when they can level their house up again and start spending more decor points, only to hear the whistling of the wind.
These are the new wave of players that are bringing a lot of new players to the game, by promoting the housing system, both actively and passively. There is a lot of social media now dedicated to player housing, there’s streamers dedicated to showing off house builds and what can be done, there’s content creators dedicated to making how-to housing content. It’s not just some side show activity for players to do when they get bored at the end of the season whilst waiting for their personal interest new content to drop. Housing is Blizzard’s new cash machine, and it will need regular maintenance, regular updates, and regular teasers of what is to come if it’s going to keep making them money.
Blizzard went big on housing, and it got even bigger than they expected thanks to the creativeness of players making more of it than even Blizzard imagined could be done. If they neglect it now, if they fail to address problems, and don’t give the players a regular teaser of what is to come, it will rapidly turn into a PR disaster for them.
I’m okay with the exterior budget, it’s a technical problem, I get that, it is what it is, and the real fun is all on the inside anyway. There are remarkable things people have done with their houses within budget, on the outside. The reality is, Blizz could give us a thousand housing points for the outside and we’d beg for 1001.
The lack of domestic items is frustrating, as is the lack of basic building blocks - a brick, a flat plank of wood, a round metal pole, a fish, a piece of fruit, a vegetable, a bone. I do find it funny that the devs put a lot of time and effort into creating fancy furniture with pre-designed clutter for us, only for us to spend 5 decor points to clip most of it into invisibility because the only thing we want on it is the towel on the hang rail, because we don’t have a 1 point towel on a hang rail.
Having no idea when we can expect to get more levels, more room budget, more decor budget, and be able to build that new extension we’ve been planning since capping out on level 9, not to mention bug fixes… yeah, the silence is a problem.
Crafted decor mats… that’s not the worst grind I’ve ever done, but it’s certainly up there with the greatest grinds of Azeroth.
I really want to make one area of “The Lodge” in a very new Silvermoon / Suramar City sort of aesthatic… and a LOT of what would make that work is behind a very high wall of Midnight crafting costs, or maybe coming in 12.0.5, or just not possible with what we have because for example we can’t dye the walls and can’t sink rugs into the Silvermoon walls.
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On crafting Midnight deco… there are some recipes that are rare drops that involve just going around opening treasures potentially for hours.
That’s Blizz treating Housing like it treats everything else, a giant time-wasting grind.
Nope, my steam is still a-cooking and I’m having a hard time to play at housing what with group play in Midnight and gathering for flasks and feasts. If I get a new decor from a raid boss, I save it until the end of my night and I learn it and check it out and find a place for it.
You paint a bleak picture that isn’t true. Not really. Claiming that there are hard-core housing players is one thing and then suggesting that they’ve reached end game is another. If they are hard-core then they are wiping the slate clean and cheerfully starting over. Dividing the players into a convenient set of people isn’t the reality when players are doing raiding and housing and questing happily and all at once. No one is leaving the game over housing content. And it is not a ploy to get folk to buy tokens.
I was in “the lodge” today staring at a room for almost an hour, trying to figure out how to do something.
This is not an attack.
This is a lament at how Blizz is handling things – low-rate drops on crafting recipes for housing, unaddressed bugs, basic items we don’t have yet, etc.
I say it’s not an attack on Housing, you accuse me of lying and attacking housing.
I try to make it clear how much I’m still drawn to housing and that it’s really not an attack… by saying this comes after stating at a room forever (and it’s not the first time this week, I’ve started and blown up this room at least five times) and realizing that what I wanted to do isn’t possible… and you say that crap.
I just wanted to see if anyone else was hitting a wall, or feeling this frustration… if anyone else was really hoping that Blizz would get some of these issues fixed already.
Im not sure if “blaming blizzard” is the goal here, I’ve been adoring the housing system, but its easy to see her point when you dont have an active housing community considering the social aspect is already such a big sell to housing and neighborhoods.
Yes, housing is new, I do think things will get better over time, but it is a very limited activity, comparative to other activities (because its new), and the bugs/limited decor options/loneliness is going to turn people off for now.
Every aspect of housing is very DIY or “find your own motivation,” which is great for (some) people’s creativity and building, but is not working very well for the social aspect.
My comment wasn’t even about sitting alone, it wasn’t lamenting the social aspect or lack thereof.
It was a response to them saying my opening post was an attack on Housing.
If I hated Housing, I wouldn’t have spent hours the last couple weeks trying to make that room work, or post all the stuff I’ve posted for Housing on these forums, or keep putting in bug reports about the Dark Folk Walls Bug.