On the official World of Warcraft: Forever forums, a discussion unfolded in the first days of the beta: some call housing "the closest thing to homeowner status," while others break down in detail why retail housing failed and doesn't fit the very idea of Forever.

Discussion about housing kicked off on the official World of Warcraft: Forever forums in the first days of the beta: whether Blizzard should ever add it to the game. The thread so far has only two posts from two different people, and they look at the question from exactly opposite angles.

"It's basically homeowner status." The short post "Why are a certain type of people complaining about housing in WoW Forever" boils down to one point: housing is the closest thing to homeowner status a player will ever have, and it's unclear what anyone could dislike about it. The thread collected one reply from one participant and stopped there.

"This idea was already tried — and it failed." The opposite side argues its case at much greater length in the post "Hard truths about Housing." The author breaks down the retail housing experience and boils the failure down to two causes.

Social: Garrisons isolated players by handing them private conveniences; neighborhoods were designed to avoid that isolation, but in practice the houses stand next to each other and players still never meet their neighbors — proximity stayed geometric, not gameplay.

Economic: housing shipped with two currencies on a single decorative loop — grindable Void Marl at an inflated rate and real-money Hearthsteel that the audience received negatively. The author compares it to Pet Battles: a feature seeded and abandoned as soon as the launch agenda ran out.

What this means for Forever. The post's main argument is about Forever itself. It says outright: "the identity of Forever is an inversion of the retail trajectory: no flying, no housing, the bet is that players need friction restored and a shared world space, not another privately monetized property." The author's conclusion: adding housing to Forever means importing not "a good idea with a bad execution" but precisely the shop that worked in housing exactly as designed.