I have a suggestion for another season based in an alternate Azeroth where Horde and Alliance are collaborating rather than at war. Players can roll any race as normal, but with the following changes:
Horde and Alliance players are friendly to each other (see below for discussion of pvp)
Everybody speaks the same “common” and shares the same channels.
Horde and Alliance can group and raid together.
All players can interact with and are friendly to both side’s NPCs
All quests are open to both horde and alliance players.
That’s the core of it. Obviously this is very PVE focused, but I think you could still incorporate PVP still by perhaps having two other factions (maybe pirate or centaur factions) that players could earn rep and pvp rewards for by running battlegrounds, completing world pvp objectives or using war mode.
Some other optional and more experimental ideas that could fit under the banner of “Collaboration”:
All quests can be completed when in raid
Increase maximum number of people a raid group can hold to 50.
All dungeons and raids have their max player limit removed. They are still balanced for the numbers of players they are designed for (and drop corresponding amounts of loot for those numbers), but this change means you can include extras if you want to and don’t need to turn anybody away. if you want to 50-man RFC, you can.
Increased xp buff when in groups
No debuff limit
And some suggestions designed to facilitate collaboration in the form of sharing items within a guild, whilst also weakening RMT:
Instant mail between guild members who have both been in guild at least one month.
Quest items can be traded between guild members who have both been in guild at least one month.
Soulbound items can be traded between guild members who have both been in guild at least one month. (Option: Trading an item in this way causes it to become Battlebound, and lose 5% max durability each time it is traded.)
Remove auction house. Gold cannot be traded. This is to encourage gifting and barter instead.
Another idea for PVP servers is to make it so every group/raid/guild is hostile to each other and let people form their own allegiances. Call it season of collaboration and conflict.
I like it. It sounds fun, and it’s not the “Please make me OP” of normal Seasonal suggestions.
I would at least try this out - only thing I would like removed is the Nothing is Soulbound idea. It would just make for everybody needing on everything to sell on AH
Yeh, this is fair. That’s just a side suggestion and not core to the idea so could easily be excluded.
Or, how about this for an alternative to encourage guild collaboration:
Players who have defeated X number of raid bosses together become ‘Battlebound Allies’ with one another, up to a limit of Y Battlebound Allies per player. Battlebound Allies can trade soulbound and quest items with one another.
X would need to be a number that’s not onerous for guild members to achieve with one another, but is high enough to make Battlebound Boosting a big time investment. Y would need to be something like 50-100, around the size of the number of active raiders in a large guild.
There might also need to be some limits on how many times an item can be passed on in a chain (perhaps soulbound items become ‘Battlebound’ and lose 5% max durability each time they are traded), and/or how often each player can give away a Battlebound item (perhaps limited to one item per week or month).
I updated the original post based on RMT feedback.
Its a cool idea, specially for PvE oriented players. However, I cannot envision a scenario where the above quote holds true. I am sure, people profiting from RMT would rather rephrase it like this:
And some suggestions designed to facilitate collaboration in the form of sharing items within a guild, whilst also strengthening RMT
Maybe, but I feel that’s a lot more effort for bot cartels, and also gives players (specifically guild officers) the power to moderate bots themselves. And if there are guilds that encourage botting, it’s a lot easier for blizzard to identify RMT customers and take appropriate action. It also enables a new potential sanction: a permanent ban against being a guild officer for those that have enabled botting.