Feedback: Housing

In Development Midnight Alpha Test
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Welcome (home) to Alpha!

We’re incredibly excited for you to get your hands on Housing and wanted to put together a quick post to discuss what to expect in the coming days and weeks as well as list out the known issues. Please send in your feedback and file those bug reports since they’re critical for us to make this feature the best it can be.

Buying Your First House

When you login, you’ll be given a quest “A House for You” which will lead you to your faction’s Neighborhood, introduce the Steward, and take you on a tour of the Neighborhood, and ultimately direct you to buy your house.

Please note, the house cost is not final and assuming you used a template character, you’ll have plenty of gold to afford it.

Once you have a house, start building! You’ll be able to find a variety of decorations on vendors, professions, and throughout the world and use them to make your house a home. Lay out your rooms and expand into a spooky basement or lofty attic. Explore the Neighborhood and see what’s hidden around the corner or say hi to your neighbors.

What’s New in Alpha Week 2

  • Outside decoration should now be enabled, allowing you to decorate the outside of your house. Build the flamingo lagoon of your dreams! This also means you can move and rotate your house around your plot as well.
  • Similarly, you should also be able to customize the exterior of your house with various chimneys, roof options, dormers, and other architectural delights.
  • A variety of decor is now available at the Neighborhood vendors. Shop away!

What to Expect Going Forward

During Alpha and Beta, we’ll be adding a ton more content and functionality to Housing, including:

  • Moving your house will become possible. Please be especially careful of your choice since it is not possible to change right now.
  • Exterior decoration (being able to place decor outside) AND exterior customization (being able to change the outside appearance of your house) will both be enabled.
  • House exteriors will also be able to upgrade their visual size
  • Charter Neighborhoods will be enabled allowing arbitrary groups of players to have a private neighborhood. In the meantime, Guilds can create their own neighborhoods to test.
  • Endeavors will be turned on, allowing your Neighborhood to work together to achieve rewards and welcome new NPCs to town.
  • Social visiting will be enabled, allowing friends, neighbors, party members, and guild mates to easily visit each other.
  • Lumber is very much a work in progress and will be getting a lot of updates, polish, and balancing.
  • We’ll be adding tons of new decorations, profession recipes, neighborhood activities, and more content.

Fixed Issues

  • The UI to select the destination house when visiting is no longer slow to load.
  • A whole lot of other less visible fixes have been made!

Known Issues

There are a number of things we know about already and are actively working on and want you to be aware of ahead of time.

  • Walking towards another player’s doorstep can sometimes cause a crash. Focus on decorating your own home for now.
  • If you’re customizing your exterior and then you swap to any of the decor editing modes (Basic, Advanced, Customize, or Cleanup) the decor editing in that mode might not work.
    • Workarounds:
      • Avoid swapping straight between exterior customization to any of the other modes by exiting the House Editor completely.
      • If you do end up in this stuck state in a Decor mode, exit the House Editor completely, and re-enter it.
  • While editing the decor outside, if you try to move decor too far outside the plot boundaries, player movement might stop working or your client might crash.
    • Workarounds:
      • Don’t move stuff outside the edges of your plot.
      • If your movement gets stuck, log out and back in.
  • The red outline and gridlines that signify an “Invalid location” sometimes won’t show when moving decor or the House Exterior to an invalid location.
  • The House Exterior may float off the ground slightly while dragging it. This is purely visual.
  • Entering other players’ houses will sometimes take a VERY long time.
  • For Alpha, all room placement costs are intentionally set low to enable better testing. Costs will increase to their intended amount during beta and release.
  • Private Neighborhoods with names longer than 50+ characters will cause disconnects and crashes. Be brief!
  • If you drag decor across room boundaries, a crash can sometimes occur. Put the decor away in your chest and take it out in the target room to avoid this.
  • If you have a LOT of decor in a single room and add more, a crash may take place.
  • Customizing rooms will always have the “Vaulted” ceiling type option available, though it only works on some room types.
  • Houses that are owned by other players will occasionally display the For Sale sign asset even though they’re not for sale.
  • Exterior doors are sometimes hard to click.
  • Moving your house will reset your exterior fixtures so those will have to be set again if you move.
  • You’ll likely encounter a variety of LUA errors. It’s fine to ignore these, but occasionally you may have to relog or reload your UI.
  • There are some visual issues with various pieces of decor, rooms, and customizations.

Please leave your Housing feedback and issues you encounter in this thread and any suggestions and ideas you may have in a separate forum post. Thank you and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on Housing!

8 Likes
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I’ve been playing with it for a bit, here’s some starter comments:

  • Is there a way to rotate rooms other than 90 degrees?
  • Is there a way to change the size/scaling of a room?
  • It seems like I can build UP but not DOWN, is it possible to put the entry on a floor other than the first floor?
  • A number typing area in addition to the slider when you’re rotating/scaling stuff would be nice for precision
  • Is it possible to place a new room off-center to the “main” room? I see that I can move it but it seems like it just snaps back to dead center off the main room
  • Curved walls would be nice, I remember I saw something about this in the initial video but I may be missing the pieces to do this
  • I saw a mention of choosing a “vaulted” ceiling type but I haven’t found ceiling options yet
  • This is a big, maybe future ask but squash and stretch for items would be nice. I’d like to make a table longer, but I can’t do that currently without making it taller
  • Something else that would be nice, “clone” - placing another of the same item you have selected with the same sizing/rotation options
  • EDIT, new point - It’d be nice if hallways had additional room anchor points at the midway points on either side and could rotate 90 degrees instead of just 180
  • EDIT, another new point - Having to waste a whole large room on just stairs feels bad, since room numbers are restricted. Having an in-room option that was a single flight to the upper/lower room would be really nice, potentially furniture pieces with options like single one-way flight, a switchback with a halfway landing, spiral, grand staircase, etc.

That’s what I’ve got so far, more to come I’m sure :rofl:

10 Likes
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I can help with this - When you go into the Editor mode - do the Customize Mode (#3) and click on the ceiling - this will bring up the options editing the ceiling and its the last option.

Onto my couple of feed backs for the little bit of time that I’ve had to play in the editor so far –

For the Stairs room - is there a way we can get an option to edit the stairs like the ceiling/walls/floor? I tired clicking all over it and it just brought up the options for the floor – But I admit I dont know what floor it changed as I clicked all of them and nothing happened. I also realize this might be a WIP / in a future build maybe - but wanted to bring it up just incase.

Advanced Mode : Move – is there a way to tone down the sensitivity of this? Or a setting be added for it – I was adding skylights last night and I ended up yeeting the window into Northrend (I’d say Narnia but we’re WoW) by accident with the slider.

3 Likes
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Here’s a larger point that was getting so big that it doesn’t really fit as a bullet point: Access to your house.

Right now you can limit it to Friends, Party, Guild or Neighbors to come in and interact with your house. Ideally, there would also be a custom list that you could add or remove individual characters from, and here’s why.

On RP servers, where this feature will be getting used like CRAZY, the people that you know and interact with aren’t easily pinned down to one of those groups. There’s a central hub that I want to build, a ship interior, that will be the prime meeting and public point for me and a loose group of three of my friends - so not enough for a Charter neighborhood, and at least one of the three probably will be in a Charter or Guild neighborhood somewhere else. Technically it’s the “guild” base for Blue Moon Transport, but guilds don’t really have the same purpose on a RP server so there are characters in other guilds or no guild at all that I want to be able to use it without having to recreate it themselves, even if I’m not there.

And if I were to open up the shiphouse to Guild members to enter, would it just be them, they couldn’t bring others in? I’ve got Character X, the guild master, she builds the ship interior for her house. She opens up entry to Guild members, so Character Y can use it at will. Can Character Y bring in Character Z to hang out, someone not in the guild?

Character friendlists don’t really work either, I have bunches of people on my friendlists that I know well enough that I like to look for them to interact with when they’re around but I don’t necessarily want them tromping around in my character’s house touching all their things when they’re not present. Or even people whose characters that mine haven’t talked to yet, they just looked interesting and I thought that an interaction in the future might be fun so I popped them on my friendlist.

Long story short, interpersonal relations aren’t easily defined on RP servers. A custom list of characters that you could mark as okay to use the property would help this.

6 Likes
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Guild Neighborhoods House Disappearing

Tested the new Guild Neighborhood today. Some Good an Bad.

Good

  • Guild NH’s show up at the top of the directory making it easy to find.
  • You can move your house into the guild NH

Bad

  • You can move your house int the guild NH. I know its above too. However at the time it appears Move is the only option and would mean any other toons on your WB NOT in that guild can’t access their house. Where is the buy new house for those characters.
  • When you do move your house to your GHN you can step inside. But when you step back out your house is not there. You can open the NH Directory and transport to your GNH (you know, where you are standing) and the house appears. But when you go in it starts over.
  • The 4 sale sign stays outside the house instead of the pilar.

These are the issues discovered so far as of 10/04/2024 (October 4th)

2 Likes
11

Coming back to this after completing the first floor of my house as much as it can be completed for now, with some additional impressions:

  • Creativity is pretty restricted by the initial limits. That’s somewhat to be expected in an evergreen feature, but some of the people who were the most excited about this are probably the ones who wanted it to be more sandboxy, less progression-based. There’s not really a way to tell what progression will actually look like yet, but I hope that it’s generous.
  • Limits on how many times you can place an item that you own are frustrating. I put down a long table by sticking together two tables and wanted to line it on both sides with the same chair, but nope. I get two basic chairs and that’s it. I wanted to place two beds, but you only get one of each bed so the second bed had to be Orgrimmar style. At the very least, I hope that obtaining additional of the same item can be done at a discounted rate as a QOL feature.
  • I mentioned this above but it was more of a question, now that I’ve worked out the mechanism I hope that there are eventually more than one central anchor point for a new room on each wall and different room shapes available, with slider scaling. A decent workaround in the meantime though seems to be instead of having “real” additional rooms, segmenting off the existing room with interior walls in the configuration that you want. Doing this often will run you out of wall objects, though :unamused:
  • I’m really, really hoping that by launch we’re going to get the ability to save layouts per character and/or buy houses for our alts that are unconnected to our “main” house. This will be really, really important for the RP community. A couple of my characters live on a ship, but one lives in a spooky manor in the spooky forest, and one lives in an arcane tower. I’d love to build a house for each of them and swap between them as needed.
  • Overall, the potential costs have me leery. Please keep in mind when you set final price points for this kind of stuff that the roleplayers who will adore this feature the most aren’t often gold-flush whales since we don’t do a lot of content or get into being AH goblins as much as “regular” PVE players. Not a ton of us are sitting on massive gold stores to drain and since guilds are more about story groups and in-character professions and alliances than raiding we don’t really dump gold into our guilds either. I will give you that roleplayers are typically possessed of credit cards that they’re not afraid to use, I just…hope this doesn’t turn into that kind of situation, where you can only get a limited amount of house unless you’re a whale with large amounts of cash to burn. I’ll reserve judgment on that until we see the final costs, though.
5 Likes
12

Housing is GREAT and I’m having a blast collecting items around the world! (To everyone mentioning that the starting decor inventory isn’t generous enough, there’s plenty out in the world that’s available to collect to expand your options!)

My process has been to build until I hit the decor cap and then reset the house to try another idea.

The more I do this, however, the more bugs I’m encountering with my inventory:

  • Some items refuse to be deleted: I click them with the cleanup tool or hit ‘R’ and they reappear a half second later.
  • Missing items: When I delete a room containing items, some are not making it back into my house chest (they’re just…gone?). Some way to reset or recall items that are missing or clipped beyond a room or otherwise misplaced would be SO useful.

I’ve also encountered issues with scaling:

  • Items scaled to 200% are sometimes very hard to select. When this happens, there’s no way to remove them other than deleting the room. Then problems like the above ^ compound.
  • Collision is not scaling with the items. This makes it difficult to build platforms/floor tiles with scaled items, for example, because you just end up falling through them. This is most noticeable on objects >150% scale.

I also have some thoughts about the Advanced Mode UI that would make building easier:

  • I’d love an option to put the axis colors back on the gimbals! I’m sure these controls were switched to a gold color to make the UI cleaner, but it would be so much easier to rotate and move objects if we could see which axis we are grabbing. In earlier builds, it seems that gimbals were color coded like other standard 3D programs. Even if this is an option we have to toggle on, I’m sure that certain builders would choose this.
  • Someone already mentioned a field to type in an exact value for scale or rotation, I second this.

Also, having both houses share the same cooldown for the teleport doesn’t feel great. I keep porting to the wrong house accidentally (user error for sure) but then I have to wait 14 minutes to try again.

Edit: I remembered another thing. Entering and exiting my houses will sometimes reset the wall/floor textures to default or a past state.

Thank you so much !! I’ve had so much fun deep diving into the system this weekend and can’t wait to build more (assuming, of course, that all my missing items show back up again :sweat_smile:).

11 Likes
13

Was thinking of a nice way to say the exact same things here, but Kthir hit the nail on the head. To add to everything Kthir stated, I’ve encountered these exact problems with just the default items with a fresh Alpha character and nothing new even placed in the house.

I cannot stress enough how much the option for axis colors should absolutely return. When I did finally get to decorating, I kept clicking the wrong gimbal because some items produce their own ‘light source’, and depending on how you scale them, it makes the entire gimbal glow with the same intensity and you can no longer tell whats the x, y or z axis.

7 Likes
14

Housing has been temporarily disabled while we address an issue. We’ll update this thread and the update notes when it has been re-enabled.

4 Likes
15

Housing has been re-enabled. Here are the updates in Midnight Alpha Week 2:

What’s New in Alpha Week 2

  • Outside decoration should now be enabled, allowing you to decorate the outside of your house. Build the flamingo lagoon of your dreams! This also means you can move and rotate your house around your plot as well.
  • Similarly, you should also be able to customize the exterior of your house with various chimneys, roof options, dormers, and other architectural delights.
  • A variety of decor is now available at the Neighborhood vendors. Shop away!

Fixed Issues

  • The UI to select the destination house when visiting is no longer slow to load.
  • A whole lot of other less visible fixes have been made!

Known Issues

  • If you’re customizing your exterior and then you swap to any of the decor editing modes (Basic, Advanced, Customize, or Cleanup) the decor editing in that mode might not work.
    • Workarounds:
      • Avoid swapping straight between exterior customization to any of the other modes by exiting the House Editor completely.
      • If you do end up in this stuck state in a Decor mode, exit the House Editor completely, and re-enter it.
  • While editing the decor outside, if you try to move decor too far outside the plot boundaries, player movement might stop working or your client might crash.
    • Workarounds:
      • Don’t move stuff outside the edges of your plot.
      • If your movement gets stuck, log out and back in.
  • The red outline and gridlines that signify an “Invalid location” sometimes won’t show when moving decor or the House Exterior to an invalid location.
  • The House Exterior may float off the ground slightly while dragging it. This is purely visual.
  • Exterior doors are sometimes hard to click.
  • Moving your house will reset your exterior fixtures so those will have to be set again if you move.
1 Like
16

Playing around maybe I missed it, but I would like to have the option to have some QoL symmetry:

  • mirror the piece I’m placing from the center of the room
  • add 2 pieces mirror each other with a 90 degrees offset
  • add a copy button so I can directly copy an existing piece and place it again
4 Likes
17

Loving the housing system, its what I have spent all my time on the Alpha with so far. With that said, I know from all the interviews that the discussion points were “We want it to be simple” which is admirable but I think some aspects have been made too simple.

Specifically Advanced Mode Movement and Rotation and the lack of colors to differentiate X, Y, Z & Yaw, Pitch, Roll. Very often I find myself having to move my character around to untangle which line is which.

Looking at it from one angle I can assume “oh, this circle is for rotating along this axis!” but then when I move it I realize I am moving the wrong angle.

I am all for “keeping it simple” but I think that the lines in advanced mode should be color coded to some capacity to make it more obvious at a glance which is which.

Along the same lines, I am finding it hard to move and place larger objects precisely like walls.

The move and rotate widgets are placed so high up on walls that it can be a pain when trying to line them up with the lower segments on the house/ground. It would be really nice if the team could figure out a way to keep movement and rotation widgets on screen at all times regardless of where your camera is for better precision control. Something that keeps the widgets within camera bounds.

Another thing I immediately ran into was the sheer lack of exterior decoration allowance. We have a budget of 200 to work with which sounds like a lot but with that 200 I only got to decorate about 1/4 to 1/3 of my properties exterior. It doesn’t help when you have things like benches taking 3 resources and some items taking up to 5. Cobblestone pavers add up fast and same with large grass patches and bushes. I understand that the exterior budget will be less because there will be 50 plots in the area and it could get crazy, but looking at the 10 renown levels I saw no increase to it at all.

Also, since moving in the fence that highlighted my building bounds vanished. It would be nice if in building mode you could clearly see your property line and know where it ends and what you have to work with. Right now its a guessing game of not knowing where the edge is without pushing an object right up to it.

Overall I think the housing system, bugs aside, has been wonderful! Really loving playing with it!

7 Likes