I'd been thinking of making a topic like this for a while as this seems a recuring problem to me, our guild seems to have an insanely large amount of money constantly coming in and nothing to spend it on. This is money simply from Hearts of Darkness; off-spec gear (we charge 100g and nothing else for it); patterns, gems ect.. and it seems no matter what I do theres always more and more. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing by any means, on the contrary, its brilliant. We, with money from guild bank, had a competition for SR gear materials at the end of last year which meant we funded our entire extended raiding team with SR-gear at no cost. But it seems to me that there really isn't that much to spend gold on baring just handing it out. Having money in guild bank isn't a bad thing but I certainly feel that it would be better used facilitating raids, doing something for the guild, helping us in some way other than gathering dust.

As such I was wondering what other guilds have been using it for and what people think of how it should be used? I myself have been known to give out large amounts of mana potions/food buffs on progression nights. I've given out over 400 Flasks of Distilled Wisdom in the last 6 months and fund all respecs (our holy paladin that goes protection for Hyjal for example/our back up feral druid who is normally resto). I even, about a month ago had a small "get-together" almost where I made people do a number of rediculous and random things for cash and ended up giving away over 10,000 gold in about 2 hours. Something that was fun, but in the end the prospect of gold instead of adding to the excitment made people somewhat bitter.

Regardless I'm desperately trying to find some ways to try and make a better use of our guild banks money and was wondering if anyone had any tips or tricks of their own? Or even have ideas they don't have implemented but would like to seen tried. My unoriginal bunch seem to only want gold to have gold which I'm heavily against as I'd like it to have some use and as Muru/Kil'jaedon are heavily unlikely to require anything incredibley demanding in terms of monetary contribution I feel like more outlets are needed for guild money. As long-winded as this is, any ideas? I'd rather not have to let the first person to trade me hiding somewhere in Azshara have 1000g again.

I got almoust same problem there is so much money incoming.

Our guild bank outcome:
-40g repairs per raid day per raider.(>4000g per week)
-100g for respec per raider if needed.(500g per week)
-500g if raider roll lw.
-xx resist cauldron.
-xx repair bot.(10 per weeek)
-xx iron shield potion.(50-100 per week)

Still bank credit balance is steady 50k gold.

What we did honestly was save our gold up for Sunwell and when we entered Sunwell we turn on repairs before, during, and shortly after raids so that repairs are covered by the guild. We then started covering all consumable costs: food, flasks, oils, etc. This encourages the guild to go all out on new content. You could easily do it pre-Sunwell if you like, just cover repair costs and consumables for progression nights. Look around, is every single person flasked? If not, why? If the guild is paying, there is no excuse!

If you're consistently short on some class, put out a bounty on finding more. Find a resto shaman who's ready to do progression content, collect a 1k gold bounty.

Every time our gbank tops 30.000 gold on a sunday, people with >80% attendance get a 300-400g sendout.
And that happens almost every week actually.

Interesting to see you guys posting gold values as well, 50k being a lot for you. For us, as we entered Sunwell after something like 5-6 months of farming Illidan, we had I believe in the 130k range. Mind you, with respecs, repairs, and consumables being covered by the guild bank, that dropped pretty fast, so you may not want to be so eager to shuffle it away on hand-outs. I really do recommend giving out repairs and consumable costs for progression content because it removes a LOT of the pain from your guild's efforts to advance.

Jeez, we are now sitting at something like 140,000 gold in our guild bank and that's with all of the above that I've mentioned in spending. We spend a literal fortune on ironshield pots for our tanks, clearing out the AH of mats almost every day. It's insane how many mats we go through and somehow we still have that much gold.

I apologize for getting a little off track here but I want to give an idea of the magnitude of things that we keep track of and how we organize things. We actually ran a pretty successful sales program prior to 2.4. It involved running people for T5 gear and BT/MH attunement. We sold single items and had package deals ranging from about 8k for a set of T5 and attunement. We had more buyers than we could support. At the same time we also had a contest program that purchased flask/oil/cauldron materials at about 30-40% of AH price. The contest prizes were the top 3 collectors were able to bring in 2 friends each and get an instance run of their choosing with all items that they wanted. The response was insane. People were sending literally thousands of items in each day. In the end I calculated that if we had purchased everything from the AH we would've paid 180,000g and we ended up only spending about 60,000g. We still are near the gold limit as well.

We provide the following:
Foods (1 stack a night)
Oils (2 a night)
Flasks (2 a night)
Potions (2 stacks a night, including ironshield, demon slaying, etc)
Repair Bots (a given)
Cauldrons (we keep 200 of each in stock)
150g of repairs (on progression nights), 75g (regular nights)
100g a night for respec fees
Drums (we've recently added these to what we provide)
We pay the full costs for members to roll LW/Enchanting

Some of the things we are working to include in the near future:
Enchanting materials (I would like to be able to fully enchant everyones gear)
Haste/Destro potions (we provide some, but not what a raider uses fully on a progression night)

Part of managing your bank effectively is making sure it is organized. We have to have 9 guilds (for 9 guild banks) each tab stocked to the brim not even including thousands of items still in the mailbox. A good mod you can use to handle all of this is "BulkMail2". You can set it to send items automatically to any mail recipient you wish. This can cut down quite a bit on the time you may spend managing the sorting of your bank materials. I have one "processing center" banker that everyone sends things to, then I just open the send tab and press one button and it all gets sorted to where it needs to go. Officers who can craft have a character in the other guild and can pull out items as needed to craft and resupply our main guild bank. Everything is then split up (flasks are in stacks of 2) so each raider just comes and grabs what they need before each raid.

We plan on running a similar program here once SWP goes on farm for BT/MH so that we can provide raiders with flasks and other materials as they are leveling for WoTLK. Our ultimate goal is to cover 100% of the cost of raiding from each and every consumable right down to the enchanting and gemming of gear. The only thing that I would note is that it takes a considerable amount of work to get this off the ground, especially if you haven't done something like it before. I believe it is well worth the effort though as since we started doing this program I've noticed a considerable drop in anxiety from raiders about having to provide consumables for progression raids. It's really provided a much better raiding atmosphere.

We basically do the same thing as stated above. It makes progression nights much more tolerable when you dont have to worry about consumables/repairs and can just focus completely on getting your shit handled.

I'd think that would be quite easy with the coming patch, no cooldown on the Void Shatter spell would make it pretty easy to get a steady flow of LPS's going. Dusts and GPE's aren't to hard to come by either.

Yea I agree which is one of the reasons we're working on putting it together. It just takes more space (which we don't have anymore of) and another level of organization and management to work out all the kinks. We're actually looking for other ideas of what we can spend our money on for guild benefit. Not quite sure what else is left.

We pay for all repairs at all times on all characters. We provide nearly all consumables, including exotic ones like demonslaying elixir. We supply a large portion of the enchanting materials people use. We taught some randoms on the server to farm Sunwell trash and they sell Sunmotes to us now at 1500g apiece.

When you're supplying absolutely everything, you can burn through gold pretty quickly. We burned about 30k while learning the Eredar twins. We've distributed a similar amount of consumables in anticipation of M'uru.

I wouldn't be surprised if most raiders have absolutely no gold problems themselves either, I am in no way hardcore, yet I'm sitting on 20k gold with absolutely nothing to spend it on.

The problem is that gold income rate is simply way higher then any sink you'd have.

I would try to stockpile as much gold as humanly possible for wrath and then hand out a fair amount to all your core raiders so they can gear up faster once they hit 80 and depending on how much gold you actually have maybe buy consumables for leveling up faster. If you really have that much gold then the sky is the limit, really. Pay people to do the gem vendor daily quest.

In extension of what Trouble said, the major problem I have is deciding whether or not to do dailies to *add* to my money, since I have essentially zero sinks. I don't pay for repairs (thanks, Guild Bank!), I don't pay for my mana potion injectors, draenic elixirs, or healing power elixirs (thanks, Guild Bank!), I don't pay for my Golden Fishsticks (thanks, Guild Bank!), and I don't pay for any other raid-related consumable (epic gems, mana oils, the odd flask when I can afford to use them, etc).

So if I do dailies ... I just made money. If I sell something on the AH from my trade-skills, I just made money. It's insane how much money can flow in when you have no expenses.

The only things I spend money on are for alt-trade skills (banking stuff to level enchanting 1-375 some day) and enchants/gems for my pvp gear.

If you can afford to do this for your raiders, it takes a huge stress off of end-game raiding. Suddenly, a wipe is annoying not because it just cost you 4g, but because it wasted your time. It puts the emphasis on your valuable *TIME* and not on consumable farming, repair money farming, or gem/enchant mat farming. And that's how it should be : focus on killing bosses, not on the trivial details.

Any guild that killed Illidan before Christmas should have had 50k+ in the bank going into Sunwell, along with 6 tabs full of stuff. If you didn't, then you wasted 3-4 months of time and access to huge income sources, and I'm sorry for your raiders.

Can i just ask, from where are you earning that amount of gold? We have like 30-40K in guild bank, paying only cauldrons and respeces ( you know the guild stuff, nothing personal) and we are still stagnating.
Do you earn money only from disenchanting and selling recepies or something more?

The people reporting really huge amounts of gold probably killed illidan a good while ago and have been selling most of their gems and hearts for quite some time, in some cases with very little competition.

The BOE (shoulder) recipes can sell very well, and most of the time your raiders will not want them. If you've already made SR gear you can sell hearts of darkness pretty safely also. Green gems are usually in low demand as well (Seaspray) but are worth it to non guildies for the epic pvp gems.

As a guild that has not yet downed Illidan, we are still sitting on a mountain of gold.... but it's not just in the guild bank. So many members are sitting in the 5-10k range it's stupid. It's to the point now that people have ZERO reason for not having "niceties" like epic mounts.

How Blizzard felt creating all this gold with no sink was a good idea is beyond me. Inflation is already starting on many items and in the not too distant future I can see raw materials being very scarce compared to gold. If in an hour I can get 100-150G from dailies, that puts a "price" on my time. As long as I can still buy more herbs and mats with that money than I could farm in the same time, prices will continue to go up and up.

As for what guilds can do with 100k+ gold... really the answer is nothing. You could do some fun things like try to sponsor event's on the server with a gold reward. I know on Bonechewer one guild organized a "rally" type event from STV to EPL with planned alliance roadblocks along the way. It was quite clever.

I'm sure WoLK will have some huge money sink once they see all the gold out there... 10k swiming walrus mounts anyone??

Considering gold from quests will increase I'd hardly call 10k gold a huge money sink.

I am pretty certain it is a deliberate move on Blizzard's part to reduce the impact of repair costs and respecs. By inflating the economy they get to do this without having appeared to "back down" on the issue. It also hits the gold sellers pretty hard as it reduces the value of their holdings and by making gold more available will possibly reduce the attractiveness of buying gold. Especially, as this is essentially a reduction in the price of things like epic flying mounts which I suspect started the gold buying frenzy.

As a bonus most people at least in the short term view the inflation as a good thing, but then prices reach a new equilibrium in line with the money supply and things are back to normal in the AH. The interesting question for me is what will Blizz's stance on gold sinks be in WTLK.

Not sure if this is the case on most servers, but I know on Bonechewer that as soon as the Anvil was done the number of people doing the dailies has dropped SIGNFICANTLY.

Perhaps people are burning out from dailies or maybe it's a matter of everyone has all the gold they really need. I know that I'm really have trouble getting motivated to dailies anymore... the only one of any consquence to me is my fishing daily. I'll get a pet crocolisk if it kills me dammit!!

I guess it's just a shift in priority for most people... where before I farmed herbs and ore to sell for cash, now I farm cash from dailies to buy herbs/ore/gems/whatever I need. Eventually the prices will adjust so we'll be back at equilibrium.

I run the risk of turning this into an economy thread, but guild banks are very much tied into the economy. What you are seeing right now is just basic Economics 101. The money supply has greatly increased, while the demand/supply has remained relatively static. Therefore, inflation. As more people reach their reputation goals and/or tire of the dailies, you may see prices come down just a little bit, but I wouldn't expect it to be that much since at any time you can resume doing dailies to replenish gold.

As for whether this is a good thing, from a raider perspective it most certainly is. 18 months ago, you had lots of people burned out in in late Naxx from crushing requirements to raid at the end game -- especially so for healers who were very much gimped with respect to farming compared to today. These days, I don't have to go farm up a bunch of consumables, and what I do use I can just buy straight off the AH and do a few dailies to recoup the costs. A "wipe night" now is no longer soul crushing with you brooding at work the next day wondering how you were going to find the time to farm up all the money you spent last night.