In World of Warcraft, the community enjoys housing. But not everything is perfect – as a limitation is clearly annoying.
For several days now, there has been housing in World of Warcraft for everyone who has already purchased Midnight. No matter how you look at it, the feature is well received by many. Everywhere in the world, you see characters running around looking for furniture merchants. Many guilds are currently only hanging out in their neighborhoods and have put raiding on hold for now.
But as much fun as housing is, there is a rather big detail that slightly dampens the excitement for many: The limitations for outdoor decoration.
What is the problem with the outdoor area? While you can unlock more space and higher decoration limits for the interior of your house, that is not the case for the outdoor area. There, you can only use specific “outdoor decorations” and have a limitation of 200. However, this does not mean that you can actually place 200 items – many objects consume 3 or even 5 slots. If you only place large objects, you can reach the limit with just 40 items.
Just for comparison: In the interior, this limit can currently be increased to over 2,000.
Additionally, the outdoor area can hardly be illuminated. Almost all lamps and lightings for the outdoor area are disabled. This means that many areas in “darker” building zones are indeed living in darkness, causing their front yard to appear quite desolate.
Why are there these restrictions? A while ago, there were no limitations in the Midnight beta. But this led to problems. Because placing many light sources or a very large number of objects caused World of Warcraft to lag or even crash on older PCs.
This is not surprising: When 55 houses place thousands of light sources, some even with many particle effects, it can push some PCs to their limits.
As a result, many of the outdoor features, like the lamps, were disabled for the Early Access of housing.
That this causes frustration is shown by many posts from the community, like this one from the WoW subreddit:
Lighting for outside is coming
Will this change? Yes. Blizzard has already announced that lighting for gardens will return. Whether the decoration limit of 200 in the outdoor area will be increased is currently still questionable. This likely depends on whether the developers manage to resolve the issues on older computers, ensuring that decorations are only loaded when you are very close to the corresponding house of a character.
However, this change will probably not arrive until the release of Midnight in March 2025. Even though it is frustrating, one should not forget that this feature is currently an Early Access, which also serves to show Blizzard where there are still issues.
Have you already dealt with housing? How many hours have you spent on designing your own little house in WoW? Or can you not understand how people have fun doing this for hundreds of hours?
The housing even allows some to finally move on from WildStar.
