Housing without emptying Azeroth: private doors, shared services and a guild hall with no Auction House

Should Forever have player housing at all? Inside two EU forum threads, over the past few days, a narrower question has surfaced: can you give players homes without emptying the world they came for? Everyone quoted here is a player, and every idea is a proposal. None of it exists in the game, and none of these ideas comes from Blizzard.

Doors in the world you already know

Fenrixen's 1 November post proposes apartments in existing major cities and a limited number of houses or small homesteads in places like Elwynn Forest or Durotar. You'd reach yours through an actual building or doorway, then enter an instanced interior, personal or guild-instanced, so many players could own the same address. The exterior stays part of the shared world. Fenrixen hopes that would give older cities and zones reasons to be visited "beyond banks, auction houses, and questing".

Tiroshi goes further: finished buildings in those same places, sold through an auction-house-style bid, with the winner decorating the home and paying monthly rent as a gold sink. Miss the rent and you lose the house. "Yes everyone wont be able to have a house," they accept, in exchange for no instanced houses and no neighbourhoods. More could come with new cities or content.

Keep the shops outside

The older thread had already aired the fear those ideas are trying to answer. "We do not want to take players away from Azeroth," Darkgirl wrote on 30 October. An invitation-only home with its own structures and market, they argued, "will be a game of its own".

Lonesamurai's answer was to split the home from its services. What if the vendors and profession benches were in a small town outside, and that town was what got raided? Darkgirl liked that better, and imagined a house for showing off raid emblems and boss kills, perhaps a library of books found in Azeroth that could be stolen. Then they talked themselves out of it: "too much PvP would properly chase players away", so that version "would be in another game".

A guild hall with no Auction House

On 2 November Potatomilk rejected player housing outright and offered a guild hall instead. It's a detailed list: a board for loot rules and recruitment, a duel arena, training dummies, a trophy room. The list of what it must not have is the point: no Auction House, no basic crafting stations, no personal bank, no class trainers. Those are things, they say, "you should be doing in the open world and thus populate it with life".

Neiara doubted it: "Guild halls in other games are always empty", and you wouldn't want to invest in something you lose when the guild master kicks you. Potatomilk's reply is that nobody sitting there instead of playing "is literally the intention", and that the guild bank should pay for it.

Whether any of this would keep Azeroth busy is unknowable from here. What's striking is that some of the people who want a home and the people most against it are protecting the same thing: a reason to walk through the actual world. For the nearest official remark we've checked, which describes no housing system, see our note on the far-future tease at the end of the 22 October podcast.