What a whirlwind! Charter neighborhoods were finally introduced into _World of Warcraft_ a little over a week and a half ago, and I have learned so much. While the focus in most games, not just WoW, is on larger communities and guilds, charter neighborhoods offer an opportunity to foster a smaller community. With just 55 plots total, you are limited in how large your community can become. That being said, small does not mean lesser, and it also doesn’t come without its quirks. Embercoast Reach started because my friends and I wanted a place where there wouldn’t be any pressure. We wander from game to game, and it just makes sense for us to be together. As I got more into the actual neighborhood design and player housing in general, I started to realize I wanted to grow this small neighborhood into a real place people could call home. So I built us a Discord server and waited patiently until charter neighborhoods went live. Originally, we thought it would happen when they kicked off endeavors, but there was yet another bug, so we had to wait a few days. Once the bug was fixed and everyone signed and moved in, it was time for me to think about advertising. I went with the tried-and-true method, posting to the forums and another Discord server that was focused on housing. While I got no hits at all from the official WoW forums, we did manage to find two new neighbors via Discord. But with 55 plots to fill, I was starting to wonder if maybe we should have just stuck with a guild neighborhood, because that might be an easier sell. Around the same time, Facebook started suggesting groups to me focused on WoW and player housing. So I decided to join in and wound up posting about our charter neighborhood in one of those groups. Within a couple of hours, we had eight applications. As of today, we now have ten folks who have joined the neighborhood who were not part of our original friend group. I am hoping we can grow this a little more so that I can travel around the neighborhood and see all the cool things, big and small, that people have built. One of the best things about this whole experience, though, has been our endeavor progress. There was a lot of talk on the official forums about how public neighborhoods are empty and only one or two folks are doing endeavors, so they might never finish them. This had me worried, because we are a small community that doesn’t want to pressure folks to log in and do a thing, so I assumed we would be right up against the end date to get ours completed. Boy, was I wrong. We pushed through our endeavor in no time and finished just six days after signing the charter. Small but mighty indeed. As with any new thing, there are downsides. There are still bugs, like the fact that I can’t complete the server transfer I wanted because it keeps saying I own a home even though I transferred it to an alt. The UI for endeavors leaves a lot to be desired, and you need an add-on to get any real information. Even though we are a cross-faction community, local chat is still faction-specific, so we have to use the in-game community to chat, which uses Battletags instead of character names. These are just a few of the issues, and I might do a rant post another day about the things that really bug me. All in all, I am proud of what we’ve built so far, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here. I plan on applying for the new ambassador program they mentioned in the State of Azeroth video last week. I have pretty low expectations of getting picked. Things like this usually go to larger communities, but you never know unless you try. Until then, I’ll just be puttering around my house and looking for more places to advertise our community. Speaking of which, I have some awesome beachfront property available. 🤣