It seems the vast majority of drama we've heard regarding guild banks comes from ninja schemes and disgruntled members. Vaela of Hyjal expressed her exasperation with guild banks in the Guild Relations forum. She feels that there is an imbalance between players who donate resources to the guild bank and those who make the most withdrawals. The original poster asked for suggestions on systems to fairly distribute guild bank resources.

The responses focused on cooperation and reciprocity with the guild bank. The purpose of the guild bank is to fun the guild's activities and exchange objects of value. In the end, the system comes off as a communist type of public ownership arrangement, as opposed to the free trade system that rules the auction house. To quote Karl Marx, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Communism as we've known it has largely failed, most likely because people don't fully buy into the system.

People are always talking about WoW as the 800-pound gorilla of the current gaming world (or at least the MMO sub-world). I don't have much non-WoW MMO experience, so I don't know where WoW innovated or where it just took/refined standard genre tropes. I do know that WoW must be making a big splash in the economic side of the gaming industry, with its massive legions of subscribers. I remember reading a while back about some game developers saying WoW was bad for the business because a lot of people were just playing WoW and not buying other games, and there may be something to that; I, for one, would almost certainly have bought a Wii by now if it wasn't for WoW.

What have you observed WoW's influence to be, good or bad, artistic or economic, in the gaming industry? What further influences do you predict it will have?

This interesting article attempts to explain the economics of Azeroth in terms of real life economic theory. As players, I'm sure we can all poke holes in this theoretical view of our favorite game, or perhaps find the lack of game knowledge frustrating. For example... Goods rarely cost less in the neutral auction house (though sometimes lower prices will reflect lower prices on the Alliance or Horde side - but usually neutral prices are jacked up to the highest possible profit rate), due to the higher cut the Goblins take out of the transaction. Trade-skill items are of less economic importance than seems to be placed on them - very few craftable items being desirable, long-term, over bind on pickup drops found in dungeons. And it does not consider Blizzard's continued efforts to rid the game of gold farmers, which has an ongoing (though variable) impact on the available supply of gold in the economy. However, it is always interesting to see how real economic theory can apply to a virtual game world, and I would say the article is worth a read.

Update: The comments below may well shed more light on the subject than the initial article - so read on!

According to Next Generation, World of Warcraft is a nice little cash cow for publisher Vivendi. With first-quarter earnings of $30m this year, an increase of 109% from the same period last year, Vivendi's financials have beaten analyst expectations.

A report from Vivendi says that "this dramatic improvement was driven by a growth in revenues, with an increased proportion relating to the higher margin of World of Warcraft business". While increased development costs are also cited, it seems clear that a fair amount of the money pouring into Vivendi's pockets is staying there.

While players suffer from server and infrastructure problems, is this entirely fair? Well, publishers don't get into the MMO business to make losses. Without seeing a complete breakdown of where our subscription money is going, we're not placed to judge.