It's not something you want from a design perspective, or they'd just give all players hundreds of bank slots. You don't want storage to become a nonissue, and for database reasons you may not want every random mule alt to have his own one-man guild.

Just make the guild bank start off at zero slots and have increasing costs (starting at 100g, going up to 1k or 2k maybe) for each set of slots (whether they're actual bags or something else).

The mailbox gives everyone hundreds of bank slots already, its just a pain in the ass to manage. The mailbox has what equates to a bi-monthly fee for each item stored. If they just extended the cost to a bank system it would be bliss.

On another note, I'm kinda surprised to hear so many stories of GMs not caring at all.

Some time back on our server, a guild website was hacked, an officer account was used to PM another officer for the guild bank password. The hacker was successful and ripped the guild bank of a minor raid guild (still like 10k's worth). It was obvious that they had been sharing the account but the GM team was extremely cooperative and went into a frenzy to restore the items and ban the guilty people.

Within 24 hours, they had restored about 90% (some had been sold so I'm considering it "restored" when they were given the low sell value instead) and had banned the hacker, a friend of his who helped him, his girlfriend who helped him, one of our officers who knew the people and was letting the hacker's girlfriend play from his credit card, and another member who was playing from his apartment at the time (same IP). Both of our members had been playing for 9 months with a perfect record when their accounts were suddenly banned without warning and without ever getting a more specific reason than "compromising an account". Despite having the victims supporting us, they were being entirely ignored and couldn't even get clarification for the ban. That incident had me busy for the better part of 3 months before we gave up, so I'm curious when they would have changed their policy so dramatically.

Was there a change at any particular point in time? This happened around November 2005.
Do the EU servers have a different policy than the US servers?

When our guild bank got stolen, the GMs disabled our GM's account for account-sharing. We got no help, no items, nothing. Raiding pretty much died around that time and never got going again because we lost vital mats to replace the gear we lost with server transfers. I'm convinced Blizzard just doesn't care.

Eh, that's why I don't let anyone log on my account. Was the bank stolen by someone who keylogged the account, or was it just theft by someone who had access? Even if theoretically the former, it could be the latter masquerading.

Let's say I'm a greedy asshole, or let's say I harbor a grudge against my guild or guild leader, and I have access to the bank's account info. I go to a PC cafe or some other nontraceable IP that I have no direct connection to, log on, change his password, liquidate the assets, and then find a quick buyer for them (say, IGE). As far as the guild leader knows, he got "keylogged" and farmers stole his stuff. But did he really? Can it be proven? Can Blizzard prove it? Not really. And they're not going to do a restore of assets for someone who could be making it up, and the fact that account-sharing is against their EULA gives them an easy out.

There is no need for account sharing, just tell one guy to be the bank. Just like monopoly.
If nobody is at home the bank is closed, like in real life. Its ok.

Maybe you should've read the thread then, because it's only 1 page back on a 3 page thread.

So much of the discussion about guild banks comes down to player's concerns over security, but it is quite clear that under the current system, there is no security, and people are taken advantage of all the time. I would then argue then that the point of security is moot all together. A guild banking feature should be created for no other reason than it is a needed design feature in a game that thrives on guild creation and sustainability. Will it be taken advantage of? Sure. But every feature in this game can and will be exploited and that doesn't neccessarily take away from their neccessity within the game. A guild bank is no stranger an evolution from player run guild banks than the auction house is to sitting in a zone and shouting over a trade channel.