Except, it wasn't an example of what you posted. Everyone brought their own pots, with no guild bank help. However, if we were learning something, the bank would bring a surplus of pots so that we could continue attempting even after individuals ran out, as well as the necessities such as Stoneshields, greater armor, tank flasks etc.

Maybe I was just thrown by you saying because there is no way that dividing money / materials up amongst guild members would have allowed us to complete Naxx as efficiently as having it in a centralized bank. And no, not every member could have done it individually, nor can you really expect them to.

Well it wasn't quite that bad. Requirements like that we met on a rota (and I should qualify that it was not WoW but a different MMO)

Division of labour isn't really hard my point was more about the locking up of capital. The value of anything that is banked is nil until it gets used or sold. It's not just the security angle that was stressed in the original post here. Economically these typical huge WoW raid guild banks with great stocks of rare and valuable resources are a drain on the economy of the raid guild

There is definitely room to argue to what extent you need a guild bank. I do not think you can argue the fact that you do need one though. That someone in the guild, or multiple someones, has/have to be trusted with some amount of assets and that those assets have a worth.

In our case, clearly we fucked up. We banked too much, did not distribute it back to members fast enough and, most of all, trusted the wrong guy.

I still do not see how Blizzard can have a system that requires a guild bank and then on the other hand claim no responsibility for the repercussions of such a system. And maybe they came to a similar realization, as many people have commented, there is less of a need for centralized banking in WoW 2.0. At least so far.

Still, these items have real world value and I think it could easily be argued that a crime was committed. I dont mean to be overly dramatic and of course its not the same as if 50 peole had their wallets stolen, but we lost things that have real world value and we know who took them. Blizzard ought to do something about it. Its a black and white issue, there is no grey area here.

Exactly. Supplying my own stoneshields and elixirs for a night of learning attempts on Nightbane was taxing enough. Supplying the same consumables every night for a week of hard wiping plus flasks? I don't even want to think about it.

II’m not so sure its as black and white as you make it out to be. Not at all to make light of your situation at all which sounds like it sucks.

But from Blizzards end this is what they know.

Character X on your account, has 5k or more worth of gold and high end materials.
Character X mails all of this to character Y on crazy mans account.
The account with Character X quits the game, I assume canceling their account.
Months pass
Character X's account is reinstated.
Character X petitions blizzard asking that their mats be returned.

This could very easily be a scheme between you and character Y to produce tons of extra gold. Its not like any amount of chat logs could determine this to be true or false. You could be the crazy one, who quit and now suddenly want all your stuff back. For all you know he could have spent all that gold buying 1000 mounts and have no way of giving it back. or worse buying inflated AH grays and now the gold is distributed across the server.

Blizzard cant in good conscience give you your stuff back because it could potentially ruin the economy which affects lots more players than you and yours.

I’m not saying your lying, or that your story isn’t tragic, but Blizzard simply cannot take your word for it and give you your stuff back.

This is the reason that I cannot see anything more than a token guild back system implemented. Like a super mail slot, but really if you mail all your crap to some random guy and he doesn’t give it back, that’s not blizzards fault, and not theft. Because there are people who would take advantage of a full re-imbursement system then it cannot be implemented.

Hacking is different as in theory no gold leaks into the economy. Person X logs onto your account, shards/sells all your gear and mails it to person x.

Blizzard finds out, banns person X (thus removing the extra gold) and then gives you your stuff back. In fact I hear they are not even doing that any more, but simply giving you a green kit of gear for your class, which I can see being the case since gold laundering though the AH could happen much faster than they could respond to.

I hate to be the bleak one, and I really do wish things were different but the reality of the situation is that there is little that blizzard could do to make things right by you without opening the potential to do very very wrong by lots of others.

Is it possible that he DID mail you the 100,000 gold, and blizzard flagged it and stopped the transfer?

If you know the approximate time the money was sent, and from what character, you a GM can look into the details

This is absolutely not a black and white issue and I don't see a reason for Blizzard to step in.

The question is really, who did they belong to? There's really no way for Blizzard to police it. Just because the guy leaves the guild with a bunch of potions, mats, or money on his character means Blizzard needs to stop him and say "hey little fella, do you have a receipt for that?" Like it or not, WoW is not a real-world economy. If you pile all the best loot on your MT, like many guilds did for MC, and the tank leaves the guild, does Blizzard step in there too? Is progression gear "guild assets"? What about that enchanter you gave all the best recipe drops to because they were an officer or had the best attendance? When he server transfers do you say, hey Blizz, return our recipe investment?

Fact is you have to manage your assets better and move on. It's a rotten thing to go through, and you may have a vendetta against the guy, but it sounds like he's already in enough trouble in real life.

Also, to be honest, this is probably the best time to get your guild bank ripped off if it's gonna happen. I can't really think of anything besides potions and herbs that the guild needs heavily in TBC at this time - no cores, frozen runes, yadda yadda. My guild's bank doesn't even have herbs or potions in it because almost every member is alch and/or herb, or uses an alt for it. So really it just comes down to some discretionary gold.

I think that a lot of this can be applied to 'independently wealthy' players also. I know 2-3 people who really enjoy or excel at the money-making aspect of WoW. One of them has been hacked (he got his account restored, but it was incomplete) and another got 2 of his main accounts banned (long story, it was an unjust ban but he didn't get his accounts back). The latter had a few other people holding onto various high-value items and some gold. When he opened a new account, he had a nice cache waiting for him.

Ofc a raid-/guildbank is fine for collecting mats for crafted stuff and boe's left from your raids because noone needed them.
But, we also got one and collected every damn shit in the game, high stacks of everything you can think of. Well, did that really helps us? Don't think so.

It was nice to equip our alts with boe t1 and some blues/purples from ragna/ony/nef, but that's it. The smaller your raid is and the more active your raidmembers are the less you may need to aquire gold for eg consumeables. Got a raidpool of 35 people for 2-3 kara runs and 1 big raid? That's just fine, share the money so that they can buy whatever they want, but under the condition, that they bring the needed stuff for the raid by themselves. If they can't afford it, ask why.
a) There are a lot of people can't work with money in real life or gold in wow and manage to save it for real needed things (lucky for us, there are no gambling or other addicted making things ingame then raiding ). For those, it's quite nice to see, ah ok next day there is a raid and we need 10 spp for loatheb, just send a mail and get them in time. Getting 90k money at your bank saved for what? If you need the consumeables, farm/buy them by yourself if you want to beat the encounter.
b) The larger your raidpool is, the even more it's a problem to share it on a fair way. Boy with 100% attendance getting 1000g, someone with less getting proportionally parts? Quite hard to handle, and just think of vanilla where a lot of your raiders didn't need to farm for that much encounters - only for some dps races maybe. Our maintank was prepared, brought some dirge's, rum, ssp for every damn boss - but only ~ 50% of our healers spend time fishing nightfin, cook tender wolf's and brought enough greater mana potions to heal as long as a fight may persist. The DPS lacked even healthpots because dps wasn't an issue any time, joining with pvp specc didn't annoy anyone.. so :/
c) Your guildbank may be managed by one till xyz people - one till xyz source's of errors, corruption, suppression and so on. The op got a really bad case of human mind disturbing, but who save's you others from getting those problems any time in near future? What prevents your bankmanager account of getting hacked while checking ingame mail from an inet cafe by a trojan as our's did obviously several month ago?

There are some real risky parts on using a guildbank, but ofc it's has some comfortable advantages (since without, noone would like to use it, meh). We decided to save stuff like sand for chroma, elementium ore for tf, scrap's from naxx since there is only a use for it under particular circumstances - every other thing may be rolled out during a raid. We demand our members to bring the necessary articles to the raid and who's not in the raid won't benefit from the bank during share by proportional attendance. So if you are lucky, having 50% attandance an win 80% of your roles you may win more "green daggers of the guru" then a 80% attendance with 20% win ratio - but who does really care? Addicted raiders will put in the time necessary to collect their consumeables, sharing some with friends or buying it from the ah while spending time playing arena battles. Not that much addicted raiders wouldn't get a higher output of the minimum of effort they maybe put in while raiding with us.