World of Warcraft’s player housing early access is already a treat—with players immediately setting to work constructing all kinds of madcap, HOA-violating nonsense, as they very much should be. One trick players discovered (outside of being able to sit anywhere) was the ability to send their entire homes skyward.
This was a UI bug—turns out that with the “move” widget on a lot of homes, there was a hidden vertical arrow that could still be clicked on. You could also fiddle around with moving another object vertically to trick the game into thinking this was the case (you can see YouTuber DiscordianKitty doing so here). Which has, naturally, led to some banger creations. Like this Howl’s Moving Castle-esque mecha strider by user Frofidor on the WoW subreddit:
Once I knew how to lift the house into the air, I knew I had to give it legs. from r/wow
Per a post by community manager Kaivax on the official WoW forums, the dev team made a rapid pivot to decide that, actually, this wasn’t a bug—it was a feature:
“Almost immediately after the 11.2.7 patch went live, we saw players using keybinds to elevate houses off the ground, even though there weren’t UI controls for that. We quickly began work to enable the controls so that it would be easier to move a house upward.”
Kaivax explains that there are only a couple of concerns with this—firstly, that “The underside of houses aren’t modelled or textured. Players who lift their houses may decide to hide that part behind other things.” You also “might want to consider building a ramp or a jumping puzzle or a mount landing spot” for your house if you lift it, since clicking on the door will get difficult if it’s, uh. Up.
As for the former, I went ahead and tested it and: Yeah, the bottom of the house sure doesn’t have textures on it. You’re gonna need to buff that out with some external decor items.
Oh, speaking of, Blizzard’s heard players’ cries for more external decor. For the uninitiated, the external budget is at about 200 items, which, if you know anything about how MMO players like to kitbash their homes together? That’s not a lot for those who are particular.
As Kaivax explains, “This was intentionally set to 200 to address performance concerns. Now that we have some data from live servers to look at, we’re happy to conclude that we can increase this limit by 25%. At House level 3, the exterior decor limit will increase from 200 to 250.
“We’ll continue to monitor everything, keeping an eye on performance impacts (especially as other features are added to Housing) and adjust accordingly.”
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