The Queue: Oh what a Wednesday

It’s already been a long week you guys. Let’s get to the Queue.

Bookshelves you can put books on is already an often-requested feature, though it doesn’t appear to be coming on launch. Right now bookshelves are sort of pre-loaded with an assortment of books (which are only visuals, you can’t interact with them).

There’s not much engaging to do: you walk up to a pet in the wild, click on it, and you’ve caught it. It goes into your inventory and you click it again to add it to your collection. Very straightforward for anyone who’s interested in the collecting side of things, but definitely a bit bland if you enjoyed battling.

I’m not sure if this bug is still in the alpha, but we haven’t had a patch this week so my guess is that it is. (And we’re wondering if this bug is why the PTR test of housing has been delayed.) I haven’t encountered this personally, and both of my homes are placed out of eyesight of other houses in the alpha which makes it a tough one to test. (And probably day-ruining for whoever’s home you stole, since there doesn’t seem to be a way to return it, so I’m not really trying.) But there are some clusters of houses quite close to each other, so if you can accidentally grab someone else’s house when you’re decorating your own yard, it could be disconcertingly easy to house-nap someone’s residence when you’re just trying to move the flamingos around.

GONE!

… for now. World of Warcraft has a disconcerting habit of always circling back to some kind of valor-branded currency.

I haven’t seen any housing specific animations of yet; for now we’re limited to the animations and emotes we already have.

No. Houses have permissions that let you say no one can enter, your friends can enter, or everyone can enter. You can also have different permissions for the outdoors and the indoors, so you could let the whole neighborhood come over for a garden party but not let any of them inside. But if you just want to have a lovely perfect garden that no one can enter, but only observe from afar, just set your permissions properly and people won’t be able to even walk across your lawn: they’ll be immediately teleported to the edge of the property.

Note that I have not tested this myself, but I have seen it in action. When you set the permissions, those are just the permissions and no one’s getting around them (though you can walk a few steps into someone’s property before being teleported away).

I’m at about a 5 out of 10 on concern about the player housing PTR, so, modestly concerned — particularly that it’s now two days after it was scheduled to launch and Blizzard hasn’t said anything more about it. If it is, as has been speculated, a serious bug (like being able to pick up your neighbor’s house and move it) causing a delay, why not just tell everyone you’re delaying the launch while you ensure you have a fix for this disruptive bug? It only makes sense to fix something like this in advance of a broad stress test, because it would cause disruption and reduce the amount of time players had to actually test content, so I’m not sure why Blizzard wouldn’t just say as much. The lack of communication concerns me, because it makes me wonder if there’s more going on. In the end, we just don’t know and have to wait until Blizzard has news for us.

But I’m sure they didn’t accidentally delete neighborhoods because neighborhoods are still up on the alpha realms.

And that’s all for this Wednesday, my dudes. Take care everybody and I’ll see you in the comments section.