Ah yikes, World of Warcraft: Midnight's otherwise solid housing system is soured by its premium currency, which makes you 'minimize leftovers' even though Blizzard said it wouldn't

I want to say something at the top of this—I still think World of Warcraft: Midnight's player housing system is very, very good. That's not just to soften the blow of the microtransaction analysis I'm about to hammer Blizzard with, if player housing sucked I'd say that. But the bones are really solid. You've got enough creative control to create Star Destroyers, you can clip things to your heart's content, and there's a generous amount of decor already in the game.

However, with the expansion's release comes Hearthsteel, a new premium currency (hurk) that lets you buy store-exclusive decor elements. In practice this isn't that big of a deal, since if you don't have an item, chances are you can rotate and clip five different pieces into each other to achieve a similar effect.

But in practice it's also kinda skeevy. I've got the store open right now, and Blizzard's doing that really goddamn annoying "you can only buy this premium currency in staggered amounts" bullcrap, which is especially frustrating because it said it wouldn't. Here's a blog post from November of last year where the studio wrote that one of its guiding principles for Hearthsteel would be the following:

"The costs of items are designed to align with Hearthsteel offer amounts in a player-friendly way. Buying Hearthsteel at the amount you want lets you purchase the items you want without requiring you to think about which packs should be added together to minimize leftovers."

You do, in fact, have to minimise leftovers. Hearthsteel is available in the following increments:

• 100 ($1/£0.90)
• 500 ($5/£4.50)
• 1,000 ($10/£9)
• 2,500 ($25/£22.50)
• 5,000 ($50/£45)
• 10,000 ($100/£90)

While a lot of the decor packs—priced at 2,500 Hearthsteel—are priced along these lines, the individual items are lab-designed to be super goddamn annoying. Alliance/Horde doormats are 200 Hearthsteel and the Spring Blossom Chair and Spring Blossom Tree are 250, slap bang in the middle of 100 and 500. The Spring Blossom Gazebo is 800 Hearthsteel, 200 shy of the 1,000 Hearthsteel purchase.

There are some items that aren't like this, in fairness, like the plushies and Lush Garden Fungal Fountain—but on the whole? You are in fact having to spend more than you'd otherwise want to if you wanna snag some of these items individually. Which blows.

Then there's the pricing itself. Purchasing these items with Hearthsteel only adds one copy to your chest, rather than say, unlocking them for purchase from a vendor somewhere. Which means you're paying $5/£4.50 for, say, two trees. They're very pretty trees, with animated spring blossom particle effects, but it does feel stingy for a game that already asks you to pay a subscription (or grind that out with gold via WoW tokens in-game).

And this is a discounted price. After some passionate player feedback, Blizzard reduced the price of a single blossom tree from 750 Hearthsteel (cripes!) to the aforementioned 250.

You could, theoretically, get enough in-game gold to convert to battle.net balance via the WoW token. At the time of writing on my server, a WoW token costs about 346,000 gold, which would convert to $15/£10, or 1,000 Hearthsteel. That's, er, 86,500 gold per tree. Which is affordable for the frog-farming capitalists of the world, but not yours truly.