What are neighborhoods in WoW’s upcoming player housing?

Recently, Blizzard gave players a fun February surprise to speculate about with a first look at player housing in World of Warcraft. While we definitely still have a lot of questions, one of the features teased at the very end of their rundown of what we can expect with housing was the mention of Neighborhoods. As expected from a feature that was only mentioned as a stinger at the end of the main article, we don’t have a lot of details, but we do have a general idea of what Neighborhoods are.

Simply put, Neighborhoods are where your house goes. Neighborhoods are instanced sets of around fifty houses, letting those players live together, work together, and share in the rewards of being part of a given Neighborhood. Since they’re instanced, they won’t just be sitting out in the open world; they’re also persistent, so your neighbors are your neighbors for as long as you live in the same Neighborhood — though it sounds like you will be able to move your house to a different Neighborhood if you want.

There are also two different kinds of Neighborhoods that we know about. One type is a Public Neighborhood, and our best guess is that if you don’t have a more specific place to go, this is where you will end up living. Public Neighborhoods are created by the servers as needs arise (so when one Neighborhood fills up with its allotment of fifty-ish people, the next one will be automatically created), and will be essentially a random group of people.

We were also told there would be Private Neighborhoods, which could be created by a guild or a group of friends (presumably via a community, but we don’t have any details on the actual process yet). Private Neighborhoods are purposely created by a group to inhabit together, customize together, and progress together, making a social space for a community to live together. Players can have individual houses, but whole communities can have a Neighborhood together!

While there’s a lot we don’t know yet, it really sounds like Neighborhoods tackle one of the toughest problems facing prior housing-like features like Warlords of Draenor‘s Garrison, which could be customized but was essentially just a lonely place populated by you and your army of NPCs; Neighborhoods make housing a social feature for groups to work on together.