If all your soulbound items, and all your achievements, were account-wide

[epigramx]

what's the worst that can happen?

[Hablion]

the side-effect would be account wide lockouts

[Cosmic Janitor]

It'd be like FFXIV, just with alot more pointless alts.

[Drusin]

I would HATE to see what the life of the World First raiders is like lol. If you have anyone in your raid who plays alts (you do) all loot would be valuable to them. "/roll for 8th class alt"

[Squigglyo]

Ide be happy with just Achievements being properly account wide and Reps (simply limit it to the 1st of each quest giving rep a day).

[Throwme]

what's the worst that can happen?

Worst case scenario, more people get their "BiS" items faster and quit playing sooner, leaving Blizzard with less income and us with a bigger chance that the game will be shut down or at least enter maintenance mode.

But it's not going to happen, so who cares?

[Cæli]

at this point I'd like achis to be entirely account wide, not the messy half assed system we have now.
make it like mounts/toys/transmogs.
since they decided to create this account wide concept, it's been clear that the only way to start from scratch is to purchase a new separate bnet account.

account wide soulbounds would just kill the economy and make alt progression pointless, which would probably depopulate the game extremely fast.

[Sansnom]

what's the worst that can happen?

I would not call it worse but one change would be people would stay in their highest geared character and farm items for their alts rather than using their alts. Meaning faster gearing.

One potential benefit would be a global market for items rather individual markets for cluster of servers. Some would consider this bad and I think it would be good.

[Razion]

Worst thing that can happen? Consumables or on-use item rewards from one-off quests, I think.

An example that comes to mind may be DK flasks from the starting zone that give runic power, or throwable dynamites that do CC, or those marbles from Goldshire that give enemies 75% less chance to hit, or some on-use buffs you could potentially stack the heck out of that don't count as potions/flasks/food etc. Bonuses may be small individually but combined they may count for something especially since reward power can scale up to 50 now so the power disparity to 60 is probably more relevant. Some old item consumables may be able to go around modern CC immunities in special cases. There may be some weird shrink rays or something as quest rewards that manage to affect new raid bosses and stuff.

Common fix to a lot of these items would be to either restrict them to the zones they originate from (less fun), or to make them level cap as usable only up to lv59 so it doesn't get in the way of max level content. People may still try to abuse these things for low-level twink PvP, though, but that would frankly apply to any level bracket and coordinated PvP with rating usually disables most outside sources of consumables or on-use items... maybe it's time raiding did this too?

[Alithia]

Then the game would be called SWTOR where most items are bound to your account.

[Tronski]

what's the worst that can happen?

There's so much pure stupidity in this thread.

The worst that could happen is that people have to farm gear for their mains on their alts, unless the account wide lockout Hablion mentioned is put in place.
Potentially tiresome effect would be having to have alts with crafting professions to craft BoP gear, but solvable by requiring said profession to wear as well.

Apart from that the game would be heaven to play. Tired of playing mage? Main priest without losing progress.
Clear FOTM tendencies would force balance sweeps much more often.

The only reason it's not in place is to make sure you spend more time ingame.

[Eurhetemec]

There's so much pure stupidity in this thread.

The worst that could happen is that people have to farm gear for their mains on their alts, unless the account wide lockout Hablion mentioned is put in place.
Potentially tiresome effect would be having to have alts with crafting professions to craft BoP gear, but solvable by requiring said profession to wear as well.

Apart from that the game would be heaven to play. Tired of playing mage? Main priest without losing progress.
Clear FOTM tendencies would force balance sweeps much more often.

The only reason it's not in place is to make sure you spend more time ingame.

I don't think you can call people stupid and then basically suggest Blizzard are stupid enough not to do an account-wide lockout and/or other measures. Obviously they would.

In games where you can shift around equipment between characters like that, any way to access serious equipment is going to be limited in some significant way. In WoW that would be some combination of account-wide lockouts AND less loot dropping AND crafted gear taking a hell of a lot more to craft.

And we're not talking dropping slightly less, or taking a bit more to craft. We'd probably be looking at 5x-10x (maybe even more) as much in the way of materials to craft stuff (alternatively, they might make materials 5x-10x harder to obtain). And drop rates would go down much, much further. That latter wouldn't be pure disaster, because it would make drops feel a lot more meaningful, but they'd need to seriously revise the drop system generally.

As for more frequent balance sweeps, that's refuted by all the games which have done something like this (Dark Age of Camelot and Guild Wars 2). GW2 particularly often let balance issues fester way longer than the WoW team have, and the general attitude seemed to be "don't like it, don't spec it", not "Oh we need to fix that!". The "meta" in GW2 was much more specific than WoW ever has been.

[epigramx]

Ide be happy with just Achievements being properly account wide and Reps (simply limit it to the 1st of each quest giving rep a day).

I have to admit that reps being totally alt bound is pretty annoying. E.g. I roll a new main and "congratulations you are now Exalted with the fairies of alzabath!". Dude I've been exalted with the fairies of alzabath since 2004.

[Tronski]

I don't think you can call people stupid and then basically suggest Blizzard are stupid enough not to do an account-wide lockout and/or other measures. Obviously they would.

In games where you can shift around equipment between characters like that, any way to access serious equipment is going to be limited in some significant way. In WoW that would be some combination of account-wide lockouts AND less loot dropping AND crafted gear taking a hell of a lot more to craft.

And we're not talking dropping slightly less, or taking a bit more to craft. We'd probably be looking at 5x-10x (maybe even more) as much in the way of materials to craft stuff (alternatively, they might make materials 5x-10x harder to obtain). And drop rates would go down much, much further. That latter wouldn't be pure disaster, because it would make drops feel a lot more meaningful, but they'd need to seriously revise the drop system generally.

As for more frequent balance sweeps, that's refuted by all the games which have done something like this (Dark Age of Camelot and Guild Wars 2). GW2 particularly often let balance issues fester way longer than the WoW team have, and the general attitude seemed to be "don't like it, don't spec it", not "Oh we need to fix that!". The "meta" in GW2 was much more specific than WoW ever has been.

I don't think I said that Blizzard wouldn't implement, or consider implementing, an account wide lock? I said unless, as in "if they don't".

And you are completely right, It would feel more meaningful to get drops if they were more rare, both materials and gear from raid bosses. Sadly, this won't happen, WoW players of 2020 has different needs than WoW players of 2010, and not giving them at least one dopamine kick per playsession is how we lose them as well. The 2010 players aren't coming back anyway.

But I do believe that Blizzard would disregard the industry standard and hot-nerf fire mages if *all* clothwearers in every raid were fire mages, or worse yet, if gear was universal between classes and all dps in every raid were fire mages.

[Razorice]

More Account-bound systems would be great, just leave the gear as it is. I don't want to play 1 class to gear up another, it just doesn't feel right.

[dcc626]

Ide be happy with just Achievements being properly account wide and Reps (simply limit it to the 1st of each quest giving rep a day).

only way they make accountwide anything is to make it not tied to power.

[Hellobolis]

might as well give every character access to all 36 specs at that point.

[Lord Pebbleton]

If that was the case, my character selection screen would be like this:

-Main character
-Bank alt 1
-Bank alt 2
-Bank alt 3

I have collected so much digital shit throughout my WoW years that I cannot delete a single item due to emotional value. I still have spaulders from original Zul'Aman because they were the first raid epic loot I ever received. I wish my alts could carry that weight so I could have more than 20 free slots at a time.

[Tylanthia]

what's the worst that can happen?

I'd have no reason to play my alts. All of these things are mementos from the journey of my character. When I play an Alliance alt--I want to do stuff like questing, reputations, etc. I like the fact that legion provides so much class content for alts, for example, and would be bummed if I automatically got everything on my priest (halfway through working through the quests) because I did everything on my Paladin during legion. Since it's an alt, I don't really feel the pressure of having to grind it right now--I can play it for a bit and set it aside for when I am in the mood.

It also would reduce replay-ability. The Suramar quest line was one of my favorite parts of legion, for example. I have stopped and done it on a few of my alts before moving on to BFA content for that reason. Sometimes it's nice to re-experience things.

Personally, I find the max level gear grind the least fun aspect of wow--I'm OK doing it on my main--but I'd rather be free to explore and do quests/reputations/professions on my alts.

[Eurhetemec]

I don't think I said that Blizzard wouldn't implement, or consider implementing, an account wide lock? I said unless, as in "if they don't".

And you are completely right, It would feel more meaningful to get drops if they were more rare, both materials and gear from raid bosses. Sadly, this won't happen, WoW players of 2020 has different needs than WoW players of 2010, and not giving them at least one dopamine kick per playsession is how we lose them as well. The 2010 players aren't coming back anyway.

But I do believe that Blizzard would disregard the industry standard and hot-nerf fire mages if *all* clothwearers in every raid were fire mages, or worse yet, if gear was universal between classes and all dps in every raid were fire mages.

I've played MMOs since 1999, dude.

This isn't a 2010 vs 2020 thing. That's just this sad and pointless kind of "us vs them" nonsense where "them" doesn't actually exist as any kind of separate group from "us". WoW has always been a "quick dopamine hit" kind of MMO compared to, oh I dunno, every other MMO on the market. Whether it was in 2004, or 2010, or 2020.

Guild Wars 2 came out in 2012 for goodness' sake. It uses a system much like is being proposed here - there is soulbound gear, but all the top-tier best-you-have gear is not soulbound, and can be moved around freely (GW2, because it loves its MTXes, has ensured this is a PITA to do unless you pay for said MTXes, of course). And it really shows that equipment doesn't actually feel all that much more valuable or exciting, even if you get it extremely rarely. Often in the end particular pieces of gear seem more like a millstone around your neck than something super-exciting, as you have to shift them around all the time to get them on to the right character. So you get this vibe that it's more like an admin task than "Ohhhh I have this awesome piece of gear". Part of that of course is that the gear just can't be that much better, because it's permanent, and if it was that much better, and permanent, and swappable around, it would be a huge power gain.

Dark Age of Camelot was a bit better here, but it was a game with a very, very different focus, and I don't really think the approach it took would work for well for a WoW-type PvE-focused game (it also had ultimately perishable gear).