MMO Gaming

Last week I made some changes to basic guild management. This week I wanted to dive right into the first part of my fixes for guild banks. I will still be going back to other changes in the guild management part of things, but I am trying to keep things in order of how they interact with one another and this seems the next logical step for me (though the way ideas fly in and out of my mind that may have changed by the next part.

There have been many, many posts over on the WoW official forums about this and guild halls/housing and the entire topic of just guild banks can taken so many ways that I want to focus it again into two primary components for the first part of this guild banking system.

• Items
• Money

Items first, because I like starting at the top of the list. This is probably the simplest part of the banking system because it works essentially just as the individual character banks do, there is a bank space, followed by rooms to put bags (though charging the space for these bags in my mind could be taken away). Here there is a choice that can be made by developers, do you want one massive bank (in which case increase space and make special, large bags) or do you want multiple banks for different things. Personally I’m a fan of multiple banks, it is cleaner to work with. Similar to the mining bags or enchanting bags that are already in the game make banks that each hold different items. I see a need for 7 going this way, but I’m sure something could be said for only having 3 as an option. I’ll stick with my 7 though, because it really gives a greater amount of control over things, and I like that. Mining, herbalism, skinning and enchanting each have their own bank for their products (ore/bars/gems, leather/scales/etc., flowers and dust/essences) those are all fairly easy. The other three that I added help to further spread out items. One of these others would be for potions/flasks of all kinds, another for reputation turn in items and the last for gear.

Depositing items would be a simple process, it would use the mailing system already in place. A new tab could be added when checking mail to “send to guild bank.” This option would take item/items that were placed there and send them directly into the bank into an appropriate bag (if you are thinking this would be difficult for the computer to determine think of how you currently get an error for trying to put leather in a mining bag, same idea, items are marked as a certain type.)

Obtaining items would be a bit different because there is a good chance that some pathetic players would take advantage of a good system and walk in taking everything out of the bank and then quit the guild. The easiest thing to do to avoid this is to only let certain individuals (see the individual permissions section of part 1 of the article) take items out of the bank.

That solves one problem but raises another, with only certain people able to actually get stuff out it means that other players have no way of obtaining something they could legitimately use. An option to be added here would be a “flag” option, to mark an item as desired by “X” player, when an officer (or someone with proper permissions) comes on they could load up the guild tab and optionally check out what items are currently flagged in the bank and to whom. Then they can accept or deny the person the item(s).

Doing all that covers the basics of the item portion of the bank, but what about money. Having a guild fund can be important for various reasons, maybe your guild will use it to help certain people obtain money for a mount or some item they desire, what exactly it would be used for is unimportant, how it works is important though.

A lot of guilds work on a sort of donation basis where players may send a few gold to the guild bank that helps the guild get whatever it needs, or the officers send money together to buy things. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, but it seems that a better solution is to have a guild fund separate entirely from personal funds. A simple way to do this is to set a percentage of money gained from mobs during certain places (say in a guild raid) to go directly to the guild bank and the rest would be split normally amongst the group. In this way players do not need to send the guild bank money (though there should also be a way for them to do that if they desired) for it to have some.

Now,another quick additions which I wanted to throw out there involving the bank, because there is the potential to do so much with it. A loaning system. Say a player wants to borrow 800 gold for the flying mount riding skill, but you as the guild leader don’t want to give this person money and then appear to play favorites, or something along those lines. What if there was a way for a player to automatically send a portion of all money earned from the point they take out the loan to pay it off? Obviously there are plenty of ways to exploit this, but I’m not going to cover all the ones I can think of, I’m just throwing out this idea to put it there on the back-burner for future improvements.

There is still plenty which could be done and still plenty to do to work with guilds, but that covers the basics of guild banking, from here on out I’ll probably work in extra features as they become necessary for explaining other parts.

Next week we’ll move on to another portion of the system and start talking a bit about the Guild Halls in general. Stay tuned.

World of warcraft, guilds, guild system, bank, guild bank, blizzard