I’d like to add that Ratchet does have an empty house with a plot of land (and a handy noose) just to the side of the road as one enters the city. It is a blacksmith which is fully furnished and has two floors, but there are no NPCs present. A nice place to set up shop!
We may also make a tent city if need be!
I find it rather strange I see Vulpera hold their market in Dalaran each week over Tanaris. Which would suit them much better as Vulpera have no ties with the Kirin Tor but do with trade and desert theme of Gadgetzan.
As I said further up, I definetly agree with the sentiment that the goblin towns are overall the best bets. But I can’t see any that is better than Ratchet. Booty Bay already has a pretty decent RP community, and is technically a hub already. Gadgetzan used to be a pretty big deal and could have some interesting RP themes, but I think Ratchet would be the most easy to foster a proper RP community within.
I would gladly help with the effort of creating a RP community from scratch in Ratchet. I can see a lot of really fun and engaging things one could do with it from both a social RP and a more story-driven campaign + event perspective. It would be the perfect region to set up various neutral trading companies, pirate crews would feel at home, pretty much any horde and I could see a lot humans who would find themselves there since Theramores destruction. But pretty much any entrepreuner or adventurer/mercenary type character would naturally flock to this town.
I personally used to host a collection of gambling night and competition events in Ratchet on another server and would gladly revisit that concept.
While I don’t mind, I can’t help but wonder if Dalaran’s flaws aren’t overshadowed by its many merits.
There is already a community there, and while it is not active 24h (Dalaran isn’t a hub like, say, Stormwind, with a lot of casual role-play) it could be a good idea to rely on something that already has established activity.
Beyond the issue of inherent magical theming people have already expressed as a con, I’d really want to agree with you on this. But the fact that there already is a community there might actually make things harder than easier. The community that’s built in that zone currently have their own idea of the zone and a certain claim to land among other things. This version of the city and its inhabitants are not going to be everyones cup of tea, and trying to force your idea of things into something that’s been so long established by other players might be pretty difficult. I have tried (though perhaps not hard enough). 
What about a little event á la second purging of Dalaran. “Make Dalaran magic again”, the Kirin Tor having enough of mere simpletons littering ‘their’ streets with shoddy goods. Mass teleporting every common street vendor to the desert sands of Tanaris and voilá, everyone’s right where they belong.
I’d also say that of all the options avaialble, Shattrath tops the list for me. I don’t particularly -like- the place, and it suffers from pre-Cata ugliness, but it’s the largest of the options which gives it a distinct advantage.
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Most other options are about as inaccessible (Shattrath is just a quick portal away - some of these require flight masters/ flying, and maybe even a boat trip on top). Shattrath even has a portal back!
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Most other options are smaller - even Gadgetzan, which has some nice features like an AH, is really only a small handful of buildings in an area barely the size of the Trade District in Stormwind.
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It’s a very short walk from Shattrath to several different biomes - you’re in Terokkar, but can walk out the other side to Nagrand, or up to Zangarmarsh, in almost no time. The other options don’t really offer this.
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I guess it’d be interesting to see Scryers vs. Aldor (if that’s even relevant these days) playing out in an RP sense. The secure areas (whilst potentially annoying in some circumstances) could offer some options to certain guilds/ rivalries that you don’t typically get in a normal city.
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I agree. There is already a perception of what Dalaran RP is, and I don’t think that’s gonna change any time soon. While there is not 24/7 RP like in Stormwind, it’s still undoubtedly one of the biggest communities in the game so I don’t particularly think it needs a resurgence either. I think it would be more worthwhile to look elsewhere for a neutral roleplaying hub and create it from the ground up.
And as for starting one from scratch, I believe that all it would need to make a new RP community from nothing is a discord server, a group of organizers and a few forum threads; of course, you would then need to deliver actual RP that people would want to engage afterwards, but for the initial interest-check, I don’t think you need much more? There is no existing RP community to work around in Ratchet or Gadgetzen as two examples. These cities are also better in that there is a lot to work with in terms of events surrounding the towns which Dalaran does not have. They’re also much more broad in theme since anybody could find themselves in a goblin town, compared to Dalaran where it is mostly posh and fancy mages/nobles from my experience.
Edit: and since this seems to be something a lot of people are stressing over and putting into consideration, I really don’t think travel-time and a town having a portal is a requirement at all for somewhere being RP-able. Look at Stromgarde and Gilneas; there are no portal to get there, you will have to spend 3-4 minutes flying from Stormwind, yet they are still massively succesful RP hubs. If there is RP, people will spend 5 minutes getting there.
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While Highmountain is Horde aligned, Thunder Totem does allow all of us in and there’s plenty of tents / Caves and such that can be used?
With the current armistice in place, it’s not too outlandish to have a hub there? (Also quick flight from Dalaran?)
That would create the same situation as with Gilneas and Bel´Ameth, but with factions reversed, which I believe is exactly what many people want to avoid.
Also, we don´t actually have information about current state of Thunder Totem and with lack of specific statement as Bel´Ameth got, it´s safer to assume that it´s lorewise Horde-only.
The biggest struggle with making a neutral RP hub is consistency. It is all well and good to propose seeing these areas being turned into new hubs where anyone can go to.
But, without consistent RP coming in, these ideas will wither. One guild I was in previously wanted to make Hammerfall the new Horde hub. It was okay for the start, but after time, these problems arose:
- Lack of new faces - This meant that nearly 80% of our roleplay was just guild, and not every day had an event so, it turned into mid-city RP, without the city. Hunt, eat, drink, talk, repeat. There was very little input from outside sources.
- Struggle for NPC events - When you used Hammerfall, you can’t get trial accounts there easily, so you couldn’t whip up NPCs for events as easily (This was back in BFA)
- Not easy to get to - While you could get the portal, when the Horde controlled the zone, you generally had to go to the Twilight Highlands or Undercity otherwise, then fly, to get to this location. Its not that far, but still irksome.
- Isolation - Orgrimmar was still active at this time, but people generally felt alone when in Hammerfall because of the lack of interactions.
Ultimately this was abandoned because of these reasons.
So when making a hub, you have to take these things into consideration:
What is the lure? What is the driving force that will get people to come to the zone?
Can you keep it going? Are people going to come around even when the ‘main group’ isn’t there?
What can you offer to various groups? Should you offer something for all or a select couple of groups?
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I’ve considered the notion of a neutral RP hub for a long while. My personal favourite of all the fantastical concepts is something akin to a “tavern at the end of the world/universe”, a lone establishment in the most improbable place in some wild frontier (Warhammer’s Age of Sigmar does this well; an honourary mention to a tavern that was built in an outstretched hand of a slumbering giant). This, I fear, is not something that could grow organically like a hub in Ratchet (for example) could, unfortunately.
I love Shattrath but I can understand that it probably wouldn’t be as popular as I would like it to be due to its outdated graphics (that might stay the same for a long while, or forever, even).
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Usually, if we’re doing some social RP then Shattrath is the place to be. I’d love to see more people show up there for neutral RP. Someone else mentioned that it’s also a wonderful location for more outlandish (hehe) concepts, as we’ve seen a variety of races there beyond just the player races.
I think there’s even a demon.
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If they’re not half-robot half-demons then I ain’t buyin’.
I’ve considered hosting Shattrath lower city tavern nights before. I really liked the tavern nights that used to be at Ruby Life Shrine, so it’s been a big inspiration for me.
But I kept running into one problem… I also want to RP in Shattrath, not just as host… 
There was a Shattrath tavern night recently, in fact! Hosted by the same people who also have a tavern in Dalaran on Tuesdays, if I am not mistaken.
Can echo this statement. In Dalaran at least I know a lot of players in the community already lay claim to shops which can cause clashes between players. In Booty Bay I have a distinct memory of trying to set up a shop there as BOOMTEC had interests in Stranglethorn only for a very angry flower seller to rally the locals to run us out of town. Rules, lawbooks, views on various headcanons, they all come part and parcel with an existing community and sometimes it’s best to just leave them to it and not mess with their RP by trying to open up another front.
A fresh start in a new place can be very good as it lets people form a new community from scratch, but of course there’s all of this to take into account:
- Discord server, who will moderate it? Will the moderators all agree with each other?
- To really sustain a hub guilds need to be based there, guilds who regularly log on. My guild travels Azeroth aboard our barge so at times we’ll be away so a community needs plenty of guilds to keep it sustained.
- Someone needs to run community events, some hubs like Darkshire and Lakeshire just survive purely off being conveniently close to Stormwind but a neutral hub will need regular events.
- Agreements need to be made on overarching stories for more combative events for example a demon cult spreading curses, I remember in Kul Tiras we had the ‘red mist’ but unfortunately we had three different types of ‘red mist’ plotline at once which caused endless confusion.
- Law enforcement? If there’s going to be criminals about without johny law they just get to terrorise people, there’d need to be an agreement on obeying the law enforcers.
- Agreements on ownership of places. In cities like Boralus it’s easy for anyone to just move in and out of the large number of buildings, but in a more town like setting there has to be a fair balance between people owning buildings so people aren’t just not using the buildings but also moving more inactive groups out which can lead to headaches.
That being said, Shattrath, Ratchet and Gadgetzan are all good options and if people are able to come to a consensus, set up a planning group and discord server I’d be happy to join in with that. The pay off when a community works is often absolutely amazing as we’ve seen with Stromgarde. For me at least I LOVE Shattrath but at the same time my guild are very much grounded on Azeroth. 
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Does that mean I can’t do it? 
I sort of got the hype back up to consider it seriously. If people would be interested, that is.
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Host a few and if lucky, the RP will stick around after…