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.

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 might be playing devil's advocate here, but I'm going to be honest. I'm looking forward to VOIP so that I can tell people all the things I think of them during battlegrounds that have treated me to numerous interactions with the Blizzard staff in the past.

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

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.