While there isn't much of a sense of team cooperation in the WAR, I'd argue that the importance of being in a team comes from the feeling of being relied on and also indirectly helping a group of people while you compete for yourself; basically what I tried to get across in my contribution to the Discussion thread. Without teams, we could probably just run competitions all the time and there'd be no difference. There's no sense of festivity that comes from hosting a gauntlet of contests at one specific time of the year, in my opinion.

While typing this and on the topic of festivity, I did think of Japanese sport festivals (as portrayed by anime because I'm a no good anime watching man), which divides the entire school into two opposing teams (semi-randomly, with no say from the individuals) and they try to earn points for their side through a bunch of events across a day or two. Individuals draft themselves into events they're comfortable with, but there are also lots of group events that require more teamwork and such. It's actually a little similar to WAR now that I think about it, and I'm certainly not saying that this is the way to go, but it is a way to go. You lose some freedom in team choice, but the team spirit and self-satisfaction (that I get from WAR) would still exist to about the same extent, and we may get a more tight competition for points.

And while I love the idea of collaborative challenges, I'm not sure how feasible it is to coordinate cooperation over the forum format with people from all over the world to produce something amazing within a week. I don't think there should be challenges aimed for anything more than trios, though pairwork would be most preferable.

Also @Felly, from what I've seen during WAR and in my time here so far the pixel art community is perhaps more skilled and a little more active than many other forums, but I don't think it's active quite enough to call it the focal point of PXR. I could totally be wrong though.