World of Warcraft's player housing system is pretty much great—it offers an absurd amount of freedom, the decor limits just keep going up as Blizzard explores new ways to increase it, and while it sure has taken it a while, the developer seems to've learned (from two decades of other MMORPGs trying, failing, and flying) where to lean in and where to give over freedom to the players.
One thing that has bothered me, however, is the limit to two houses per account—one per faction. I'm a roleplayer, which means I have a lot of characters with different themes who might want different homes—and aside from building an apartment complex (which, hey, it's possible) I'm left without much in the way of abilities to do that.
I did, however, get to speak to design director Maria Hamilton, and principal artist Jay Hwang recently—and I've been assured that increasing the amount of homes a WoW account can have isn't off the table.
Speaking on the features Blizzard announced as part of Midnight's roadmap last week, Hwang tells me: "There's still lots [of tools] we had already planned in the beginning that we needed extra time to make sure it's perfect for you guys … The pets, the mounts, the copy-paste and the grouping and all stuff—that was all stuff we had on the docket.
"It's just making sure that we get that right, because if you get it wrong, people might lose stuff, and that's not good. So we're just parsing out how we're going to do it, and then prioritizing it in the order the players are asking for."
As far as increasing the home limit goes, Hwang adds that: "We were kind of testing the waters, and we didn't want to go too big, where it's like, 'yeah, you can have like, 50 homes!' And then all of a sudden, everyone's bogged down and [we] can't run the servers right.
"If no one could enter their house because it was lagging, I don't think that would have been a great experience in general. Since we are learning what those capacities are and what those thresholds are, we're slowly pushing those out."
This slow and steady philosophy is something that Hamilton echoes, admitting that, sometimes, testing periods can't accurately replicate the volume of players that'll be crashing against a new system: "In testing, we can attempt to replicate the expected volume, but it's not going to be the same as real players doing what they really do, so we have to be conservative at the start with these things.
"But I don't think it surprises anyone that this is something players want more of, and that they want those budgets increased, that they want more houses, more types of houses—these are all things that as we learn where the priority lies with the players, we can adjust our roadmap accordingly."
Or, as Hwang puts it: "It's good that they want more, we're just trying to figure out how to give you more." I've already got the bug, so the moment I can make individually-themed homes for each of my characters, I'm pretty sure it's over for me.
