Now that's a good looking website. There aren't many around, and while, sure, you don't really need a great looking website as a guild (it's probably better to actually be downing bosses ingame than building resources outside of it), a good-looking website doesn't hurt when getting your guildies excited about being a part of the group.
Lots more guilds and websites (including the drama, downing and recruiting news you're here for) in this week's GW, which starts right after the jump. Don't forget to send us your tips at wowguildwatch@gmail.com -- whether it's your guild or someone else's, we want to hear about it here!
WoW Insider serves up a smattering of reader comments from the past week, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Readers picked some fairly off-beat topics to wax loquacious about this week. Join [1.Local] as we chew the fat over those conspiratorial, Horde-centric folks at Blizzard ... the controversy (or non-controversy?) of Arena point selling ... the virtues of dedicated banker characters ... and what we thought was a really interesting idea for PvP-oriented crafting.
As always, be sure to dive into the comments area and add your own thoughts – unlike your mama, we like us some hot, fresh backtalk.
Employee-only bronze orc and wolf statue on eBay We thought we were the only ones constantly accused of being Horde-centric – but it looks like Blizzard gets their fair share of finger-pointing, too, from readers like Gror: "Anyone else think that this is more proof that Blizz favours the Horde? They got a 12-foot statue made of an Orc and give all their employees Orc statues. Sickens me! This game for a long time has been Horde-biased! So hordeinsider.com, your mission will soon be completed." Bwahahaha.
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.
If the wildlife in Nagrand didn't reproduce faster than rabbits injected with Viagra, one could accuse the genocidal Hemet Nesingwary, or even the Consortium (with their endless need for ivory tusks), of funding poaching on a massive scale. And of course, we would be the perpetrators, guilty of the annihilation of entire generations of species. But fortunately, those elekks, clefthooves, and talbuks never seem to become endangered. This week's e-mail is about a different kind of poaching, but one that is no less nefarious.
Hey. I have been reading your blog for awhile now and I am an officer in a small casual guild (66 accounts) that one day hopes to have some endgame on farm. The problem we seem to have is people just leaving with a stealth guild quit. When asked they normally say they left for a friends guild or something along the lines of "just wasn't working out." About a week later I see them in Shattrath with a guild tag of another guild that I know just poached them from us. I understand that it's their $15 a month but is there anything that we as a guild can do to keep them? We seem to lose one once a week.
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 PVPbattlemasters. 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'sLake 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.
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.
It's been nearly two weeks since patch 2.3 went live, so I thought it might be helpful to talk about the impact it has had on my guild and get some feedback from other officers about their experiences. What has been the best thing in 2.3 for you? What's just plain awful? Here's my take on it.
Thumbs Up: Zul'Aman
Zul'Aman has been a blast for my guild. Most of us enjoy the 10-player raids better than any other group size, so we were really looking forward to this one. Even though it's a bit of a Zul'Gurub rehash lorewise, Zul'Aman has a different feel to it than any other raid. The bosses aren't just standing there blithely unaware of your incursion. The dynamic trash and countdown timer make clearing the whole raid interesting instead of mindlessly slogging through static pulls to get to the bosses. The difficulty seems spot-on, if a little on the challenging side for Tier 4 guilds (but that's the intention, right?). Done right it should be a relatively quick run with some nice loot and badges for everyone. This raid will be a pleasure to run week after week. I hope future raids are more like this one!
Having said that, it's been a challenge scheduling all our raids.
Currently, withdrawal limits are not reset when a character joins a new guild. Whatever a character's old guild status was carries over. In this way, officers are leaving guilds, joining new ones, and gaining officer access to the new guild's bank tabs. After withdrawing most of the loot, the character transfers servers or mails off the loot and deletes his toon. The guild logs report "Unknown" as the culprit.
In theory, any character could start their own guild, or get invited as an officer to a new guild (this is common when children start guilds), just to exploit this problem.
There are many more class buffs, tradeskill tweaks, boss changes and bug fixes (including one for the button mashing issue). Check out the complete notes on MMO-Champion.
No word yet on when this Patch will hit the Test server.
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.
Guild banks are one of the banner features of patch 2.3, along with leveling improvements and of course Zul'Aman. We all know that you can store lots of things in them, although it might cost you. People are even making single-person guilds just to get to use the guild bank for storage. Come to think of it, why can't we have account banks, where we could transfer items and gold among our alts on the same server without having to use the mail? But that's not the point of this post.
No, the point of this post is a new use of the guild bank that has nothing to do with storage: checkers! Affix, from Tichondrius-A, has discovered that the bank is good for fun as well as utility. One player is using Netherweave, the other is using Arcane Dust, and they both seem to be having a good time (check the thread for more pictures). I have to say, this is the first time I've seen somebody playing a minigame inside WoW without AddOns or anything. Drysc speculates that chess would be somewhat viable, despite the fact that there is one row too few, what with the variety of item icons that exist. Tic-tac-toe should obviously work as well, though that's a fairly trivial game to not lose. Who wants to play guild bank connect four? Can you think of any other games that could be played within the default interface?
Happy patch day! Yes, it's time for patch 2.3 today, and boy do we at WoW Insider have a lot of information for you about today's patch.
If you want the whole thing in one big chunk, you can always check out our patch 2.3 tag page, featuring every post that's been tagged with patch 2.3 ever.
And this is just scratching the surface -- use the search box at the top to find anything else you'd like to know about 2.3 -- we covered it all, from the season 1 arena item prices to how Elemental Shamans got buffed to what casuals can do for fun in 2.3 to the changes to Aimed Shot. There is just a ton of stuff changing in our favorite game today, and if you're wondering about it, odds are we wrote a post about it. 2.3 is here!
As Amanda reported on Sunday, there's good news for people planning to start up guild banks (especially those of you planning to roll your own for the extra space)-- they're going to be cheaper. The prices have been lowered on the PTR, and here are the new prices for each guild bank slot you buy.
So yes, you counted right, 9350 gold for the entire set of 588 bank slots-- six times 98 slots per tab. That's a lot of storage, and all it'll cost your guild is... almost two epic riding skills. Maybe you better start taxing your guild right now. Still cheaper than it was before (the last two tabs have been cut in half-- used to be 5000g and 10,000g), but it's still a nice chunk of change. Start saving now.
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.
First of all, guildleaders apparently can't transfer or delete their characters (news to me), so there's no way they can exit the game that way without giving up the bank. A guildleader that transfers leadership of the guild also transfers leadership of the bank (makes sense). If a guildleader gets banned from the game, a GM will have to be contacted to get the bank back (so you GLs out there, don't get banned). But here's the kicker: if the guild gets disbanded, the GL will receive all the banked items in their mailbox.
I guess that's not too surprising-- if a GL had access to the bank in the first place, they can still ninja it anyway. So the lesson here is: don't put anything in the bank that you're not willing to lose to your guildleader on a bad day. It's a little strange that they put the /gdisband power in the same hands that they mail all the items to when the guild shuts down (maybe they should require a guild banker position, just to keep the GL away from the money?), but then again, if you trust your GL with your life during a raid, shouldn't you trust him or her with your hard-earned cash?
Does your guild run out of space, even after spending cash on a second account to run your bank alt system? Have 16,000g lying around collecting dust? Well, you're in luck, pretty soon a new feature being added to the game will change all that. Niko at WorldofRaids has posted an update on what we can expect with the guild bank feature being added to the game in Patch 2.3.
Each guild will have access to six tabs, each with 98 slots of available storage space. The first tab will cost 1g to purchase, with the costs rising exponentially until you reach the sixth tab, which will cost you 10,000g. Doing the math, Niko figured out that it you will have to spend 16, 111g for all 588 slots currently available on the system as it stands on the PTR. Access seems a bit tricky. It's either a you can remove items or you can't kind of system, which means you really need to have faith in those with access. Those who do have access can also use guild funds to repair their equipment should they need to do so.
Does this seem a bit expensive to you? I know it does to me. On one hand I know that with my bank alt I was full rather quickly, so all those slots will be most welcome. But I don't see anyone other than officers in my guild ponying up the cash for bank slots. So the guild banks might end up being a tough sell to the smaller guilds. I'm just not sure yet. We'll have to see.
WoW Insider serves up a smattering of reader comments from the past week, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
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Since it's looking hopeful that 
WorldofRaids is reporting
Hortus has answered some important questions
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