Instead of fixing WoW’s new floating house exploit, Blizzard makes it official

Long-time World of Warcraft players have been waiting 21 years for the new in-game housing features that Blizzard officially announced last year and which launched in early access last week. Shortly after that launch, though, players quickly discovered a way to make their houses float high above the ground by exploiting an unintended, invisible UI glitch.

Now, Blizzard says that the overwhelming response to that accidental house hovering has been so strong that it’s pivoting to integrate it as an official part of the game.

“We were going to fix flying houses to bring them back to terra firma, but you all made such awesome stuff, so we made it possible with the base UI instead.” WoW principal designer Jesse Kurlancheek posted on social media Tuesday. Lead producer Kyle Hartline followed up on that announcement with some behind-the-scenes gossip: “Like no joke we had an ops channel about how to roll out the float fix but folks shared like 5 of the dopest houses and we all kinda immediately agreed this was way too cool to change,” he wrote.

In a forum post formally announcing the official UI change, Community Manager Randy “Kaivax” Jordan noted that the team “quickly” got to work on enabling the floating house UI after seeing the community “almost immediately” embrace the glitch. But Kaivax also notes that the undersides of houses were never intended to be visible, and thus “aren’t modeled are textured.” Players who make floating houses “may decide to hide that part behind other things,” Kaivax suggests.

Players with houses that float too high may also have problems positioning the camera so they can click the door to enter the house. For this problem, Kaivax suggests that “you might want to consider building a ramp or a jumping puzzle or a mount landing spot, etc.”

WoW‘s floating houses join a long legacy of beloved game features that weren’t originally intended parts of a game’s design, from Street Fighter II‘s combo system to Doom‘s “rocket jump.” Now if we could only convince Blizzard to make Diablo III gold duplication into an official feature.