World of Warcraft's new housing feature has been available to those who have pre-purchased the upcoming Midnight expansion for over a week now, which naturally means people have had plenty of time to really, Really get creative with their new decor library. One of the boldest discoveries players made early in the game was the discovery of a trick to make houses float in the air, which many people used to create wild flying creatures. Moreover, instead of fixing this problem, Blizzard unexpectedly blessed the creation of aerial abodes.
House Raising was discovered almost immediately after the housing feature went away, and players initially used it simply to lift their houses into the air as a fun gimmick.
Apparently, flying houses are surprisingly easy to make. If you just use the base building tools, you will never be able to do it by accident since the most you can do is move the house around on the ground on your lot. However, players using Advanced Mode can raise a house by moving any decorative item inside the house or attached to the outside of the house and then lifting that object into the air. The house goes with it!
Over time, players have gotten even weirder with their flying houses, using them to create complex structures such as airships:
Mechanical Wonders:
And other miscellaneous creations:
Ever since this discovery was made, players have been understandably concerned about Blizzard fixing this since it appears this behavior of houses was not intended. However, Blizzard took the unexpected step of sanctioning floating houses and even actively trying to make them easier to create. A recent forum post by community manager Kayvax reads as follows:
Almost immediately after patch 11.2.7 was released, we saw players using keyboard shortcuts to lift houses off the ground, even though there were no UI controls to do so. We quickly began working on incorporating controls to make it easier to move the house up.
Of course, we have two problems:
The lower parts of the houses are not modeled or textured. Players raising their houses may decide to hide this part behind other things.
If you raise the house, pressing on the door may be difficult. You might want to build a ramp, a jumping puzzle, a landing spot, etc.
To be fair, this is a completely honest PSA from Blizzard, although it does make us wonder if we might see some kind of decor designed for flying houses in the long run, especially if they become popular enough. Now, if we had a whole floating city… wait, what are we? Uh, scratch it. I'm coming home.
Rebecca Valentine is a senior reporter at IGN. Have a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
