Guild Banking

How does one fund a guild bank? What do you put in it? Who can access it and what about repairs?

All things I ponder when I dont have 30 other things I'm thinking about. I stumbled across some other bloggers ponderings about Guild banks too and discovered some fascinating details.

Some guilds run the bank like the benevolent aunt who gives you candy and cash everytime you visit. Some banks subsidise the guildies purchases and some are fulltime jobs in themselves managing the gold empire they are creating.

In our guild bank it works on a give and take system subsidised by myself and a few major contributors. There are, as with all such things, those who are Givers and those who are Takers but mostly it works pretty well. I have always kept an eye on "Abuse" of the system and where it appeared that people were withdrawing for profit or excessively I would send them a nice little "Big Mother is watching you email". These mails usually resulted in the items being returned or financial compensation being made and the abuser changing their ways. I now have an AMAZING beancounter who keeps an eye on stocks and excessive withdrawing and items needed. She is one of the biggest contributors to the guild in so many ways and I know things are in safe and competant hands with her -I gave her full access and she didnt run away giggling with full bags - that in itself has to count for something. Shes the perfet person for the job in that she has eagle eyes, a strong sense of whats right and wrong and also the personality to not charge off and gkick people left right and centre for perceived wrong doings. Like me she monitors usage to see patterns (we had a rather clever guildie who would withdraw gems every couple of days for sale... the withdrawals were never obviously excessive so may have gone unnoticed. Unfortunately for him the overseer's are cleverer! Yes I know cleverer isnt a real word)

We have:

• Tab one is a mixture of 16/20 slot bags, vanity pets, quest and rep items and other such rubbish
• Tab two has enchants, cut gems, scopes, leg armor, level 80 (epic) BOE items and the like. 
• Tab three is the haberdashery with two stacks of cloth, leather, bolts of cloth and all manner of scales, spiderswebs and other such pretties
• Tab four has uncut gems, eternals, herbs and the like
• Tab five is the raid tab with fishfeasts, flasks, pots, bullets, arrows drums etc
• Tab six is the vault - accessable by the bean counter and my family. Here we keep back up stacks for the other tabs as well the secret treasures like Primordial saronites which are provided to the guild champions to buy ICC patterns. 

All items in the guild bank are free to guildies to use but are not to be used for selling or gearing up toons outside the guild. The only exception that has ever required a financial contribution are flasks and pots. Pots were 2g each and flasks were 25g the price of flasks was recently reduced to 20g each and is now to be reduced again to lower than the AH but still sufficient to cover costs of mats and a small premium for the fund. Any excess items are removed from the guildbank and sold to finance keeping the above tabs stocked and to finance the purchase of expensive items like the BoE patterns (last one cost over 3K) and primordials (20x 1500g dented the fund). The sales also finance the socialite event rewards which have a prize of 200g each. I keep the bank gold at around 5K with the rest being skimmed off and stashed for these things.

We also have a weekly lottery. Tickts cost 1g each with toons being able to purchase a maximum of 20 tickets.
♥Only EVEN ticket numbers are sold, and if an ODD number is rolled nobody wins.
♥If nobody wins another roll will be done for a second prize of 20% of the jackpot
(the remainder of the gold will roll over to the starting gold for next weeks draw)
♥If nobody wins the second prize the whole jackpot will go to the next lottery
♥From the winning prize 10% will be deducted to go to the guild
The biggest winner received 1513 Gold which is pretty impressive considering the size of the guild.

So with the planned changes to the guild ranks and the options for raiding I started to ponder the guild repairs option. Do we pay for repairs for the ICC Progression raiders? And how would we earn the money to cover these repairs? I read of one guild that has 70,000 gold in the bank and pays about 15,000 in repairs weekly. OMG OMG OMG  
I have read of other guilds requiring a weekly contribution from all its members, I have read of guilds that charge 100g for offspec loot wins, I have heard of BoE item drops being the property of the guild -offered to guildies through a tender process with bids starting at around 50% of the AH price. Items not purchased on the tender are then sold on the AH. I have read of guildes that have a full time auctioneer guildleader who just makes the money appear. Personally im not keen to spend all my WoW time making money to fund other peoples raiding.

I can see the benefits of providing guild repairs for progression raiding - people are less likely to get bitchy about wipes (They happen you know!)  and how much the repairs are costing. People are more likely to stick with the raid knowing that its not hitting them in the pocket.   


So I talked to my partner about it and his response was "Why should the guild have to fund the repairs? Gold isnt hard to make". 

He has a point. Even my son who doesnt farm, doesnt have professions levelled, spends most of his ingame time doing BG's with the QQ's, can make a pretty good income with minimal effort  - Being 15 the minimal effort is obviously a selling point for him!
Sidenote: When my partner started making gold on the AH we would pay the kid a weekly allowance ingame of 200g. This would be gone with in seconds of it arriving in his hand - not much different from RL really - only difference was that IRL he blew it on cheap chinese import rubbish that would be broken before the day was over or on bottles of coke or junk food and ingame he purchased trainsets and the like. 
 
Well even the kid has over 2000g -so yea gold is easy to come by. 5 dailies takes half an hour and theres over 100g. So what are people doing ingame when not raiding that prevents them from being able to cover repairs? Or am I suppose to bump and grind and wheel and deal in my game time so they can stockpile their riches whilst I pay their way?


So I have decided to run a poll on the guild forum as to what people want. Do they want the guild to fund repairs for the ICC rank and if they do what funding option do they want None of the options will include me having to give up my game time to finance other peoples raiding.

I will let you know how we get on.