Merchant prices for many items in World of Warcraft are a joke. At least that is what the community believes and analyzes the problem.
Housing in World of Warcraft is one of the big new features of Midnight. Many spend countless hours in their houses, decorating and crafting until their in-game home perfectly matches their wishes. However, those who want new rewards from Midnight will likely face a problem quickly. Because housing items are so absurdly expensive that one has to farm for weeks or months – and the system suffers significantly as a result.
What is the problem? Housing can be very time-consuming content, involving many days of work to get one’s house perfectly set up – at least if one can afford enough decorations for the house. But especially the new items from Midnight are quite expensive and require the resource ‘Void Marl’, which is available in small amounts from various endgame content. Usually, activities yield between 30 and 150 Void Marl.
Housing items often cost 3,000 or more Void Marl, meaning one farms for many hours just for a single item. This is critically discussed in the WoW subreddit by “JollySieg”, who writes in his post Housing decoration prices are absurd and it kills my interest in housing
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This is the classic time-wasting tactic from Blizzard at its worst. Whoever set these prices fundamentally misunderstands the system and why people play housing. It cripples the system in a pathetic attempt to increase player activity. The question is how the hell someone is supposed to maintain interest in housing when the barrier for a cool project is so unbelievably gigantic that it becomes a second job.
The problem is quite drastic. Because if someone wants to have just one of each housing item, they usually obtain them through quests – but anyone who needs more of the same type will spend many months farming intensively for them.
(…) this means that the creation of new houses is delayed, because cool ideas could literally take years to realize because this grind is so terrible.
Every price needs to lose a zero for it to make sense
How can this be fixed? The community has several ideas on how to solve the problem. The simplest would of course be a drastic reduction in prices for farmable housing items. Some people comment under the post that void marl should occur much more frequently in the game:
- “Dude, the Void Marl prices are completely insane. Yeah, I know, we have the whole expansion to farm and it’s only the first week, but unless you have an army of alt characters to repeat all the world quests, it’s nearly impossible to farm. Even a damned tabard costs 3,000.
Void Marl should drop like bronze in Remix. It should drop from EVERYTHING. Mobs, bosses, gathering professions. Everything.” – paperdodge
How drastically the decoration costs need to be reduced is painfully obvious to many. Because a halving or quartering won’t help. If Blizzard really wants players to use the new items, they would have to reduce the costs by a factor of ten:
- “I can’t say this enough: The last zero on all decoration prices has to go and then it would be acceptable. Whoever devised these prices must be out of their mind.” – unicornmeat85
- “I believe they just completely confused the people who want to play housing with the people who are willing to endure absurd grinds.” – One-Jury-6140
Another suggestion is that only the first purchase of a decoration should be that expensive. Further copies should then be drastically cheaper or even purchasable for gold, as gold can be farmed much more easily.
Cortyn says: I really understand the discontent in the community regarding the prices. If you’re someone who enjoys housing and especially wants to spend a lot of time decorating and setting up the house, then the prices are completely overpriced. Even though I have played a lot since day one of the expansion, I barely reach 12,000 Void Marl across the entire account – that’s enough for 3 to 4 housing items, at best.
It seems impossible when one needs items multiple times. For instance, someone who wants to build a troll house and needs several benches or tables from the Amani will end up farming them for months. This will likely quickly kill interest in housing for such players.
However, I am optimistic that Blizzard will rectify this in the not-so-distant future if feedback persists. Because in the last few days, the developers have responded to a lot of criticism and fixed smaller issues in the game. Now, as everyone is slowly reaching level 90 and housing fans realize how absurdly high the prices are, it’s only a matter of time before the developers are caught up by that feedback. Hopefully.
Even the shop prices for housing – meaning the real-money items – have been heavily criticized in the last few days, as Blizzard has introduced new bundles. The decorations included in them were so expensive that the developers adjusted them after just a few hours, but the negative sentiment persists.
