Hearts of Darkness!

I hope it's traceable, or there'll be some fun drama coming.

"Hey, who the fuck used up the entire guild bank?"

It doesn't specifically mention using the gold, but the "all transactions" part of
makes me think that it'll be recorded.

This will certainly be interesting to play with on a PTR, but I'm not sure if it'll be enough to move away from normal bank alts yet. I hope so!

Hmm. If guild banks are free, im making my own guild to get a huge extra bank storage area.

I could see them having some mechanism for growing/shrinking bank space along with guild membership. So a newly founded 10-man guild would get 10 slots, and gain 1-2 more with each new member up to some fixed cap. They'd also probably want to base it on the number of unique accounts in the guild, rather than straight number of members, so you couldn't inflate the bank by rolling 50 alts.

Edit: And if guild membership falls below some threshold (say 10), the bank gets deleted and all the items are mailed to the guild master. It's still "exploitable" with enough work, but probably enough to deter most people from getting "lol free bags".

The "repair from guild bank funds" is a very nice option. I can see this being used on progress nights for some guilds.

As for VOIP, obviously this doesn't matter to most of us, since we are in raiding guilds with Vent/TS servers already. However, it's still going to be very nice for the casuals who primarily run 5 mans, or very small guilds who can't/won't get a vent server.

This could be easily handled via pricing of tabs and bag slots.

If (wild presumption here) that each bank tab is a normal bank (i.e., what you already get) and each tab adds an entire set, then you can have a lot of pushback on players creating 1-person guilds by charging 1250g per tab. For a 25-person raiding guild, that's a mere 50g that each person has to raise per tab, but is otherwise largely prohibitive to a solo player.

Likewise, bag slot prices could go up by a factor of 10.

So the tradeoff becomes having a guild bank instantly accessible across your characters, or having a guild chat populated by your friends.

I wonder how exactly the "Deposit" feature will work. Will it only apply to gold or also to items? Specifically, I'm thinking this could make general raid consumable/gear donations much easier. Currently, I've been using alts to store our donated supplies of Green/Blue of X Protection gear, fish oil, gems, etc.

They noted that everything is logged somewhere in the article. The best way, though, is to drop a bot, have the GL/officer turn the "players can repair via the bank stash" flag on, and then turn it off once you are all done with the bot.

If only they would add in a fixed interest rate on these banks so guilds could make more money than only relying on guild member deposits.

But it's a huge success in DnD and LotRO on the other hand. Really does just depend upon how well they implement it.

I'm sure your friendly <black bamboo pavillion> gold farmer guilds would scamper about in glee if that happened.

"..you've got a written record -- at which point Blizzard's customer service would take over."

heh... Does that scare anyone else?

Real banks give interest on deposits, to encourage you to give them your money so they can lend that money to somebody else at a higher rate. Who are guild banks going to lend money to?

Minor Derail: Woot! King Hippo Status

Yeah I could imagine that being an administrative nightmare if people use the VOiP to drop f bombs on everyone in battlegrounds. Policing that would be extremely resource intensive to say the least

Casuals? *snicker*

BRE had investments, clearly wow should too. (/sarcasm)

I'd rather just address the costs of ownership for raid characters than try to break the server economy. They're addressing consumables to some extent (although not as far as I'd personally like) that leaves the repair bill issue. Perhaps have durability loss for dying in a raid waived. (This is what guild banks basicly do) In at least one analysis, the difference in total durability lost to intentional wipe between a raid a 5 man and a duo is silly.

Look at the total durability lost to people intentionally killing themselves (so ignore the first few people that died to the encounter, and total up the people who went swimming in the lava to get dead and started on their run back faster.)

The duo probably never has an intentional wipe - they're few enough that they just normally. Zero durability intentionally lost to save zero minutes.
The 5 man might call a wipe at 3 people dead, telling the other two to just die for a cost of 20% durability intentionally lost to save x minutes.
The 25 man might call the same wipe at 3 people dead, telling the other twenty-two to just die for the cost of 220% durability intentionally lost to save the same x minutes.

Another way to think about it is in total deaths per hour. I doubt any character in wow dies more per hour than the avg for an active raid during learning.

Maybe the first arbitrary amount of people to die in a raid/party should take the full durability beating, and everyone else misses it, or maybe it should just be waved entirely, but the disparity between costs of intentional wipes is pretty silly, especially when the "total number dead to require a wipe" is similiar.

Something like that would go a long way to eliminating the _need_ for a guild bank's "repair from guild funds" and would incidentally make raiding less burdensome, again shifting the ratio of time spent having fun higher compared to time spent mindlessly abusing elementals. Raiding is time intensive, and by it's cooperative nature, not something you can really just do 24/7/365. It doesn't need extra timesink handicaps, the organization is more than enough timesink.

The new BOE epics that require nether vortices should help out guild funds greatly imo.

PvP comes close. But then, PvP has durability costs waived, and consumable farming costs waived too. For the same gear progression level.

I can't wait for guild banks, as long as they implement them in an easy to use, non-exploitable fashion then all should be well!

As far as VOIP goes, meh this feature isn't really for us raiderish types who already use VOIP it is just to appeal to the mass of people that don't already use it, IMHO. I seriously doubt that (m)any raiding guilds will give up their dedicated ventrilo servers, unless the implementation of WoW VOIP is superb.

On a slightly related note, I definitely agree that guild bank income after 2.1 will be a lot nicer. I forsee the selling of BOE crafted items from SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT will be very lucrative sales. Not to mention if the drop rate on purple gems is high (and it seems to be) then eventually we'll have a surplus of gems to sell off as well.

Lets just hope patch 2.2 doesn't take another 4 months

Don't forget the new epic gems, specifically from BT (I don't recall if they were in Hyjal as well). Depending on the drop rate, I could see guilds turning a pretty decent profit from selling those off.

Also there's the consumables tokens, again obviously dependent on the drop rate, but if you're pulling in more than you're using, there'll probably be a decent market for selling those to lower tiered guilds.

I know I'm succumbing to the lowest level here, but yeah I can't wait to let lose a string of expletives in a battleground the likes of which any mother in earshot of her child playing wow will cut his credit card usage and destroy the computer.
Seriously I will be swearing so much I'll have to learn 3 new languages, and start mashing words together for greater efficiency.