The Queue: The perfect house for me (and only me)

I feel like neighborhoods in World of Warcraft have a lot of great plots that I would love to have a house on… but some are maybe greater than others. Do you want a smuggler’s cave just below your property? It’s a feature for some, and a detriment to others.

But there’s a perfect house for everybody somewhere.

Based on how things work in the alpha, I don’t think this is entirely true. I have seen Blizzard spin up some new neighborhoods since I started playing, but my neighborhood has never filled up. When I first chose my house there were perhaps only a half dozen others in the neighborhood, but it gradually filled until most (but not all) of the plots were taken. Since then, growth has come to a standstill, with no one interested in taking the final sad plots.

Here is how I am reading this: I think that Blizzard spins up new public neighborhoods when existing neighborhoods are some percentage of full, to continue giving players options, and perhaps to leave space for friends to move in next door if anyone’s looking for a plot in a particular neighborhood. If that’s correct, new neighborhoods will keep spinning up as older neighborhoods start to fill up, so you’ll always have the opportunity to look for the plot you want.

Of course, this is the alpha, and this is only my take on how this works: it is not based on patch notes or other hard information, only observation. Also, this is the alpha and things could change at any time. But personally, I think spinning up new neighborhoods when existing neighborhoods are mostly full, not 100% full, is a good way to leave room for growth.

I think housing needs a save feature, so you can save your current setup just like you would save a talent build. That way you could get things just how you wanted, save it, and keep experimenting or trying things without risking messing up or losing what you have.

Because if you aren’t careful it can be easy to grab something you don’t mean to grab and move it, and it’s easier to do when you have a lot of things that have been painstakingly arranged. There isn’t an undo button right now (which would also be a great addition), but I think a save state would address the same kinds of problems an undo button would help with.

And if you have a save state, you could — just like talent builds — export it and share it, so you could design things and share them with others. This feels like a great kind of community content, letting people build and share and have fun with all of the crazy creations that are out there.

I feel like we’re missing a second tier toolset that would make it easy to save things — like a holiday display in your yard — and so you could put them away and bring them back next year. Or so you could experiment with some crazy new design but still be able to go back to the original without having to do it by hand. We can create right now, but we can’t save, undo, copy, paste, or many other standard editing tools we’re used to. I think those are going to be key as the housing system keeps growing.

I don’t know if I ever carved a pumpkin by myself; maybe helped (“helped”) Dad do it. I haven’t carved any as an adult. This year we do have some pumpkins at the house, but they’re more fall decor than jack-o-lantern: there’s a big one on the front porch that is just being itself, pleasant and orange and round, and a couple of small ones inside that are simply decorative. One of them has a frowny face on it in sharpie, but it was like that when I bought it.

Carving a pumpkin is awfully messy, when there’s something nice about them just as they are. (And I’m not sure I have the carving skills to do something really impressive, so why mess with their inherent pumpkin-ness in the first place?)

’tis the season to enjoy fall colors (this includes pumpkins), but sometimes you can just enjoy the fall colors without the bloodshed. (Pumpkinshed.)

We wrote this article in 2023.

That’s all for now everybody. Take care of yourself, enjoy this lovely holiday season, and I’ll see you in the comments. 🎃