Housing Roadmap Developer Interview with Taliesin & Evitel

Posted 2025/12/03 at 3:01 AM by Archimtiros

Taliesin & EvitelUnsolved Mysteries

Many of the developers have their own idea for why housing plot numbers are so scattered throughout each neighborhood, to the point that nobody may even know the real reason why! That said, the team don't want to reorder plots even if it would make more sense, as that would disrupt player recognition.

The Alliance neighborhood also has a plot #0 while Horde does not, for reasons that are not quite clear to anyone.

Acting on Player Feedback

The Horde neighborhood received heavy iteration based on player feedback, initially much drier and dustier, but now featuring a lush southwestern portion.

Early on, there was a bug with chair scaling which resulted in players sitting in the same position despite the chair now being much taller or shorter, though the team decided not to fix it after seeing players creatively clipping them into other objects to allow sitting in places they couldn't normally.

Likewise, players have come up with creative uses for reversing windows to make them transparent or bouncing light off objects lacking textures on their normally hidden backside. While technically bugs, the developers don't want to fix these creative solutions that give players the ability to do something not otherwise supported.

There is no housing roadmap at the moment, though the team has been very open about what features they're working on and want to support in the future, with no plans to change that. Feedback has been invaluable to help direct their efforts, so please keep giving it.

Earning Decor

Making decor individual purchases was decided early on, feeling that it was important decor have a sense of purpose. They want a certain amount of friction, so that a player who decides to purchase a thousand lamps to cover their house is more unique can feel proud of their effort, since not every player can or will replicate it.

The crafting economy also weighed into this, as making decor items unlimited one-time unlocks would significantly reduce the value of recrafting, and the team didn't want to create confusion by making some items limited and others unlimited.

Initially, achievement decor was only awarded once, but early feedback of wanting multiple heads of Onyxia made the team think about how they would support that.

A lot of decor is available to players right from the start and the team has developed starter packs to help new (or broke) players get going. A lot of decor is available from neighborhoods, generally being much lower cost and easier to acquire, though returning players will receive decor from their past achievements as well.

Progressing neighborhood endeavors will also award Community Coupons, whose only use is purchasing a variety of endeavor-related decor, so players will naturally earn the ability to purchase a lot of decor just by playing the game.

Neighborhood Endeavors

Endeavors will not be available during Housing Early Access, though players will be able to level their housing renown to level 5.

Level two is unlocked during the tutorial and some amount of progress towards level 3 is likely to be earned automatically from past completed quests/reputation/achievements, so it should be pretty easy to max it out during the early access period.

Housing Exteriors

Night Elf and Blood Elf exteriors will be available at Midnight launch.

There's an odd bug where putting a house on a plot will cause it to become more overgrown rather than less, as you would expect. It'd be fun if there were some kind of living ecosystem, but you should have a pretty clean lawn once you put a house down.

It's unlikely that we'll ever see a true cross-faction Orc-themed house in an Alliance neighborhood, but there will eventually be more neutral templates and players will come up with their own solutions to create Tauren themed designs out of constituent parts.

On a conceptual level, they want to retain the general theme of each neighborhood, but players have a lot of control over how they decide to decorate, which can compensate to create some really diverse appearances.

The team would love to increase exterior budget, but there are technical constraints to worry about. The team is starting at a point that should feel comfortable for even minimum spec computers to fly through a heavily built-up neighborhood, and they'll try to creep up from there.

Guild Neighborhoods

Right now, an additional guild subdivision will spin up once 80% of the neighborhood lots have been claimed. Filling 80% of the total lots between both subdivisions will create a third, and so on. That number may change, but the team generally wants more full neighborhoods than sparse ones.

Neighborhood Activities

The team has talked a lot about what kind of cozy activities neighborhoods could or should have. What they actually want to do in their homes, gardens, or yards. Fishing seems like it makes a lot of sense, as long as there's no power progression,

Endeavors unlock specific rewards and rotate monthly, but the team is very keen on avoiding players feeling like they're missing out because they took some time away or didn't complete that month's endeavor. Each endeavor should eventually cycle back around again, but Community Coupons used to purchase endeavor decor are universal, so another solution is visiting other neighborhoods to see what endeavor they are doing instead.

Guild and private neighborhoods will be given a choice between a few different endeavors, so players can lobby for whichever they prefer.

Rapid Fire Q&A

Traditional services like banks and professions trainers won't be in neighborhoods, just because they make more sense to be in major cities and the team wants to maintain a balance of usefulness between the different zones.

There have been a lot of funny bugs throughout housing development, from books mysteriously sliding along tables, to one specific dye color refusing to set. Players also dealt with issues like losing decor behind walls and inside other objects, though there's an Advanced Mode UI now that will help players locate all placed objects inside their house.

Skybox rooms were just kind of a... "sure, why not?" feature request. Some of those ideas are just a case of figuring out how to make them work. Housing tiles use a very modular system, so adding a feature to one needs to work for all of them.

There haven't been a lot of ideas that are a hard no. Usually, it's a matter of figuring out how. There are certain things they know they're going to add, like more decor, support for pets, placing weapons and armor on racks, but the more interesting thing is seeing what emergent requests come from more players getting their hands on the system.

There should be a button on the UI allowing players to see where already-placed decor comes from... once they get it working!

Players won't miss anything by not taking advantage of early access housing, though they will have an easier time completing some achievements by playing Legion Remix.

Comment by OswaldovzkiAwesome! I haven't bought midnight yet and this is very reassuring :DComment by LimetailThese interviews are just marketing. I think Blizzard picks nobodies on youtube to avoid difficult questions such as what was the opportunity cost of all of this? Which features didn't get made?Comment by ChaZmGood interview!Comment by KloutSo no undead housing. Sweet. Love being undead in an orc shack.Comment by ErilihnHow terribly disappointing that they still have no plans to offer cross-faction housing exteriors to private neighborhoods. They want us to conform to their vision of the neighborhood, rather than let us determine what we want for our guilds and charters. When the neighborhood is private, it should be our vision that matters most, not theirs.

Otherwise I'm quite pleased with housing so far. But their stubbornness on "faction identity" in PRIVATE neighborhoods annoys me to no end.Comment by Kyraaha player who decides to purchase a thousand lamps to cover their house is more unique can feel proud of their effortComment by selkiesidheSo far, I've been having a blast-- and I haven't even gone out collecting or creating any stuff yet!

One issue that is absolutely HUGE to me though is the lack of a lock option. I have accidentally moved my house about six times already because its not locked, which means all the stuff I put on it is now out of place. I already lost a banner and don't want to move the house to find it...Comment by pronetoplaya player who decides to purchase a thousand lamps to cover their house is more unique can feel proud of their effort