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.

The days are getting longer and the nights a tad warmer. Now is a good time to go through and clean your house in the typical spring cleaning exercise. It's a good time to do that in Azeroth, too.

For me this entitles a few things with my mounds of inventory items. First, I organize my bank alts. They each are assigned certain categories of items. For instance my first bank alt gets all my gems, raw ore, processed ore, and leather. My second bank alt gets all my enchanting mats, my herbs, reputation items, food, and other tidbits. Now both these alts have been around for about 3 years. In fact, my first bank has a /played time of 10 days at level one.

As a side note having a level one bank alt at ten days really makes me question my sanity...but oh well, on with the article.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

Once your guild purchases all the bank vaults you need, your bank will start accumulating gold without a clear purpose for how to spend it. As the donations and requests from members roll in, it's up to us as officers to decide. The author of this week's e-mail is concerned about the way his fellow officers are using the gold.

I recently became a low-ranking officer in a guild after demonstrating utility in knowledge, generosity, and helpfulness to my guildmates. When this occurred I decided to take a proactive approach to the guild and began lobbying for a new guild tab to open up to the lower ranking members. Everyone seemed supportive of this until I started digging into the financials. It seems as if the current state of the guild is members deposit, and the main officers withdraw it fairly quickly. For example in the last week or so 11 members (including myself) deposited a total of about 37 Gold while 4 officers withdrew over 50 Gold.

Tigole has been busy on the forums today, and that always tends to bring out interesting tidbits about the future of our favorite game. While it is certainly not earth-shattering, the most interesting thing that he mentions has to do with the future of the PVP battlemasters. In patch 2.4 these guys will be put on a pedestal, literally. Much like the auctioneers in many cities, the battlemasters will be placed on a raised platform that is inaccessible to players in order to keep people from blocking them with their character's model. He also hints that Wrath will see even better improvements. This is certainly a welcome change to remove a minor annoyance that is sometimes imposed upon us by our fellow players.

Other posts hint at the future of guild banks, the title system, and a possible reward for Wrath's Lake Wintergrasp. First of all, he mentions that they're "exploring" the option to allow guild masters to set prices for items in the guild bank. I know in my guild this would be great for the guild leader, since it would probably save him a lot of time in the auction house and also provide an easy solution to those situations where he gets a valuable item and is not sure how to distribute it to the rest of the guild. I imagine that this could be exploited, to an extent, by guild leaders who might suddenly slap a price on everything in the bank rather than allowing free withdrawals, but that would probably fix itself over time as people leave the guild and/or stop donating to the bank.

Since the Patch 2.3 introduction of Guild Banks, it's been easier to distribute items for raids, pay for repair costs and track all the transactions involved. But did you know it could also be used to play an ancient game of tactical skill?

Player Affix of the Tichondrius server has figured out a way for her and a guildmate to use an empty tab in their Guild Bank to play checkers. As you can see from the image above, one player is Arcane Dust and the other is Netherweave, but any two distinct items could work.

Admittedly, one row is missing and there are too many rows across, but a game could still reasonably be played. It's no musical chairs in Karazhan or pet wars or even downtime games, but it is pretty ingenious.

EDIT: This is what I get for posting while out of town, double-post!

Earlier today, Blizzard updated their Armory database to support many of the new features that were added to the game in patch 2.3. I've listed a quick summary of the changes below, but the most important one is the addition of guild bank support. Players will now be able to view the contents of their guild bank via the website. You'll have to log into the Armory with your WoW user name and password, so no worries about unguilded people snooping on your hoard. Additionally, a complete bank log will be maintained on the site, which is handy since the in-game log doesn't hold many entries.

Check out my summary of the rest of the changes below.

Since it's looking hopeful that patch 2.3 will be released within the next couple of weeks, it's probably time to start getting prepared for all the long-awaited features that are being added to the live realms. Aside from Zul'Aman, guild banks are probably the biggest new item coming out with the patch.

While guild leaders will undoubtedly be delighted to delete their bank alts, (some of the guilds I've been in have had as many as five or six,) and will also have to make difficult decisions about which members get access to the loot, I'd like to focus more on the impact upon individual players rather than whole guilds. Most players that have been in Azeroth for awhile probably have a bank alt that's mainly used to store trade goods and sell things on the auction house. In 2.3, according to all reports thus far, it should be possible to set up a one-alt guild so that your bank alt will have access to much more storage space.

WorldofRaids is reporting today on a couple significant changes in the most recent patch uploaded to the PTR. First and foremost, a major change to the guild bank system. Earlier we let you know that it would cost mucho gold to purchase all storage tabs available to a guild. Now we hear that tabs 5 and 6 have had their costs reduced by 50%, making their prices now 2.5k and 5k gold respectively. It sounds like the devs are listening to the feedback they are receiving from the players.

In addition to the great news about guild banks, WorldofRaids is confirming what we already reported about the pet buff food Kibler's Bits coming in Patch 2.3. It looks like my hunter will have to work on her cooking skills after all.

Also of note is a change to PvP combat. Silence and Interrupt are now affected by diminishing returns when used on PvP targets. This is welcome information for the arena fighters among us, knowing that your spells will eventually break down an interrupt or silence.

I don't know about you, but these look like finishing touches to me. I am crossing my fingers that we will see the patch on Tuesday. Yeah, I said I'm crossing my fingers, but I am sure as heck not going to hold my breath.

World of Raids once again has the latest breaking news on the latest Patch 2.3 Public Test Ream changes! Today's class changes seem to be mostly happy buffs, especially for hunters and rogues and paladins, as well as a slight nerf to warriors beyond the jump. Also read on below for Guild Bank prices, New Arena Season 3 weapon models, a Field Repair Bot change, as well as a few new engineering toys.

Hunters:

• It looks like hunters get their version of Mortal Strike after all: Aimed Shot now reduces all healing done on the target by 50% for 10 seconds, in addition to the regularly increased damage.
• The dead zone has not been eradicated, but it has been reduced to just about 1 yard. Why not just get rid of the dead zone and be done with it? Is Blizzard paranoid about the possibility of using melee and ranged abilities at the same time through latency bugs or something?

Rogues:

• The rogue talent "Aggression" is being improved so that its damage bonus applies to Backstab as well as Sinister Strike and Eviscerate (at +2/4/6% with each rank).
• Shadowstep now has a 30 second cooldown in addition to being usable out of stealth. Its range has been changed from 0-20 yards to 8-25 yards, and its +20% damage bonus now applies to whatever special attack you make next (i.e. Sinister Strike, Hemorrhage -- even Eviscerate or Rupture). Could this make it beneficial to non-dagger rogues as well?
• Hemorrhage has received a huge buff: It now increases physical damage dealt to its target by up to 36 (increased from 10!), but its number of charges has been reduced from 30 to 10. This should make hemo rogues more desirable in groups, and also increase the benefit from having more than one in a raid -- but is it really enough?

Paladins:

• The "Fanaticism" talent in the retribution tree now reduces the paladin's threat by 30% at the highest rank in addition to 15% increased critical strike chance with all judgements.
• The protection talent "Precision" now gives a +3% chance to hit with spells in addition to melee attacks.

Many of the Patch 2.3 changes were pre-announced over the last two weeks by Blizzard. But today when the patch hit the Test server, many additional changes were discovered. And some of them are very interesting.

A new Expertise Skill has shown up in the notes. Based on the description given the meat of it seems to be that Weapon Skill Rating is out and Expertise Skill Rating is in. Weapon Skill Rating on an item used to decrease your chance to miss, increase your chance to crit and decrease your opponents chance to block, parry or dodge. Now that's been eliminated in favor of this new stat that simply reduces the chance for your attacks to be parried or dodged.

It looks like you're losing out, but the effects of Weapon Skill Rating were small (0.04% per point) where as the Expertise Skill rating has more impact (0.25% per point.) How this affects your overall dps I leave to the mathemagicians.

Weapon Skill Ratings on ranged items have not been replaced with Expertise Skill, but with additional +crit and/or +hit. Check individual items for exact changes. Also, some talents haven been altered to accommodate this new skill but what those talents are and how they were changed isn't clear yet.

Details have finally surfaced about the Guild Bank. We knew there were going to be 6 tabs and some permissions and a tracking function for transactions, but now we know the specifics. The 6 tabs will each contain 98 item slots for a total of 588 slots. Permissions to view, deposit and withdraw can be changed for every tab. Also every tab will show the last fifty transactions. So new recruits can't raid the good stuff.