The future is bright, the future is "home"

Happy Vault Day readers,

Hope the RNG gods treat you well.

In this week’s issue, we have:

• Daily Star interview with Holly Longdale

• Guide for the upcoming plunder storm event

• A new speed leveling record

• And more…

  

News

• Daily Star interview with Holly Longdale on player housing on console support for Wow (Wowhead)

• Valorstone equipment chest allows you to send veteran gear to alts (Wowhead)

Guides

• New York Times looks back on Warcraft history (Wowhead)

• Guide for the upcoming plunder storm event (Icy-veins)

• Speed leveling record: 1-70 in under 2 hours (Icy-veins)

Economy

• The wow-head economy weekly round-up (Wowhead)

The future is “home”

Unless you have been living under a rock elemental you will know the big news this week is the reveal of player housing coming in the midnight expansion.

But what exactly does this mean?

What do we know?

What don’t we know?

What do we want player housing to be?

Let’s start with what we know, first of all, player housing was said to be coming in the Midnight expansion. We don’t have a release date for Midnight but the best guesses are somewhere around February 2026. However, there was another reveal in this area following Warcraft Direct.

On the roadmap, we can see a house logo lying over the winter of 2025. I think it would be a stretch to suggest Midnights release in winter 2025, but it could indicate housing as a pre-purchase feature for midnight (but that is speculation).

In interviews following Warcraft Direct, we also got some more information. The initially teased Stormwind-style house will not be the only style. The team wants this to be an evergreen feature and is planning on releasing it with more than one style and then adding to that as time goes on.

The team also mentioned that they are learning from garrisons and the new player housing feature will not be linked to player power and will be a feature to allow players to show off their progress.

We also learnt that there is a whole team dedicated to this feature and it isn’t being worked on in spare time between patches, which means they are taking the feature seriously.

Next lets look at what we don’t know

• We have no idea where these houses will be.

• We don’t know exactly what we can do with houses.

• We don’t know if this feature will be purely cosmetic.

• We don’t know how we will unlock (or if we will even need to unlock) this feature.

• We don’t know if this will have any integration with professions.

• Does each character get a house or just the warband?

• Can every Warband character use the same house?

• Will other players be able to see my house or will it be phased?

So as you can see there is a whole lot more of what we don’t know than what we do know.

Now for the interesting bit of speculation.

While we don’t know what we will be able to do with player housing from the teaser we can make some good guesses. It looks as though we will be able to show off our past achievements (as with Onyxias head hanging on the wall), show off our toys, transmogs and hopefully mounts.

I would hope the house has a large amount of customisation (if not fully customisable), I would like to see cosmetics added to the game in terms of recipes unlocked for various professions, for example recipes dropping from delves that allow blacksmiths to build weapon racks for transmog displays. I think this would inject some needed attention into the economy.

While player power is a good area to avoid I would like to see some actual gameplay integration from this feature and it not be purely cosmetic. An example of this may be gaining quicker rested xp while logged out in your house, this wouldn’t make your character stronger but would add a nice benefit to using the new system.

I think it makes sense for the feature to be warband-bound (like most features these days), therefore new characters can receive the benefits of a kitted-out player house without having to start a brand-new house from scratch.

One of the big achievements behind this feature seems to be showing off your house and all the things you have in it, so I am a little worried about the phasing technology that seems likely to be used in this feature. Just like garrisons phasing will allow all players to have houses in the same space and see their house and not anyone else’s. This makes sense for not overloading servers, but kind of ruins the whole idea of showing off your collection or seeing other people’s collections. This could be reminded by allowing players in groups to see each other houses but still feels a little limited in my opinion.

My dream would be to have enough retail space for everyone on a server to have room to build a house, however, with some highly populated servers, I think this one will remain a dream and not a reality.

But what are your thoughts?

Now is the time to talk about what you want from layer housing, blizzard has already shown that are listening to feedback on new features and implementing changes that the community want, so let me know what you want from player housing (if you even want it at all).

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Thank you

Thank you for reading.

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What you didn’t like.