Ack! Bank mule organization questions!

[kimmyrafter]

Bunch of questions, kind of guild related but wanted to throw it out to everyone because it involves several topics...

First a bit about the guild. We are small. Fifty-ish members including alts, about 10 active accounts. We have a bunch of lvl 40+ toons, 3 50+. We've recently begun organizing some small guild events(we did the arena booty run the other nite and had a great time :D) and will be attempting a run on Zul'Farrak soon I hope. We have aspirations of doing all the end game raid stuff but obviously have a very long way to go. We are plugging away at getting to 60, beginning to give thought to faction reps(I began work on Argent Dawn and Timbermaw hold yesterday), we have a high level enchanter, blacksmiths, alchemist, and leather worker. We have a website at guildportal, are looking into Teamspeak/Vent. I feel we are making decent progress...except for the bank.

Our goal with the bank is to have members donate useful things, earn points for it, and then use those points to request items out of the bank. We want to help our members level their tradeskills, equip their toons, help out with mount money all that kind of thing. The problem is space. We have about 10active accounts and he's full. He has all runecloth bags, 3 of his bank bag slots bought and he's full. Full of lowbie armor/weapons. I had an idea to leave anything D/E-able in the mailbox, giving us a built in D/E timer so to speak. Well now my inbox is 6-7 pages long and I'm wondering is there a limit to how many pages it will hold?

Also does anyone have any suggestions for organizing a guild bank for a small leveling guild? I look and look and look and all I can ever find is people talking about their 200 member BWL raiding guilds. What I really REALLY want is a mod that will generate a list of what I have, bank/bags/mail. It doesn't have to produce an html file, we use guildportal which has a built in bank system where I enter the items I have. I dunno if it's compatible with all this php stuff and if it's not I'm not prepared to switch hosts. All I want is to not have to write everything down by hand and keep track of paper lists.

I know of RPG Outfitter's Guild Bank Manager and find it totally baffling. It looks awesome and incredibly useful but the documention is absolutely horrendous. I want instructions that assume I have no prior experience with this stuff. If anyone knows of a good tool I don't need a computer science degree to use I'd be forever in your debt.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions :D

[Naedea]

I don't know about any bank management mods, but it sounds to me like your bank is performing some functions that the auction house would do as well or better. If I were you, I would raise the threshold on the quality/value of items that qualified to be banked, do some "spring cleaning", and if it were still unmanageable, create multiple banker characters to hold different types of things.

Mail will stay for 29 days unopened, but only 50 pieces of mail will be visible at one time starting with the most recent, so things may be "scrolling off" and expiring.

[kimmyrafter]

Ok 50 items, that's good to know.

Our bank toon is an enchanter so he can DE excess stuff before it scrolls out of the inbox. I have a bit of a difference of opinion with one of our officers. She wants to send everything to the bank because MAYBE someone can use it. I want to be more selective because...well...*I* am the one who has to keep track of all this crap LOL.

I have pondered opening an extra account, for categorized mule toons. I know our GM and his wife personally so we could conceivably share the extra expense. I will have a chat with the officers regarding the 50 item thing though...thanks for the info :D

[MoRRoW]

you don't need an extra account, juste create a few lvl 1 toon where one would carry only weapon, the other only armor, the other only herbs, another one only enchanting stuff... you get the point...

Not that I know anything about bank management, but if you all create a few bank mule, you shouldn't need extra accounts...

[kimmyrafter]

I have too many alts to be able to make multiple bank mules, and I don't want more than one account to have bank alts, because that makes it too complicated to keep track of what we have.

I think we need to limit what people are sending and also consider ways to push things through the bank and get them out to guild members more quickly.

[zkajan]

just limit it by quality

weapon/armor blues and up yes, greens no
high end crafting mats (black lotus, arcane crystals, lava core) yes, low end crafting mats (linen, peacebloom) no
no consumables unless they're really high end (flasks yes, .. pretty much anything else no)

[cyradis2003]

If this were my guild I would save blue items or better regardless of level. Useful mod – eagle, monkey, bear etc - green items level 20+ (until I ran out of space then bump it to 30 ... 40 ... 50 as you guys get bigger) DE everything under the set level unless someone wants it. Now for this you can look at your guild roster and start sending out the lowbie greens based on class (level 14 monkey leather? Send it to the level 12 hunter/ rogue) This used to work well in fact with my old guild, we would randomly mail lowbie chars some good piece of gear that was 2-3 levels higher than they are to give them a little incentive to level. Don’t send them too much though, they won’t learn to provide for themselves.

Keep the DE mats or sell them depending on the quality and the relative levels of your enchanters. Just remember that should you have a new enchanter or a new person join that could benefit from lower level items that a run of SFK with a level 60 hunter takes about 20-30 minutes and provides a sack full of greens, good xp as well as a nice boost to tailors and the possibility of a 200g blue BOE twink dagger. There is really no point in keeping low level items since it really is just as easy to fun a quick farm run when needed and not have to worry about your mail box.

This is more of a D2 thing but it could be adapted: A friend and I used to both start a game (instance in this case) at the same time and race to do a full clear of a specific area fastest with bonus points to the person who got the best loot along the way. Imagine10 non grouped lvl 40ish’s descending on SFK – clear it in like 40 minutes each pool the cloth, loot and de’s if anyone was a chanter - you could easily have gained about 20-40g with the possibility of a 200g dagger as mentioned before.

The only low level mat I would save is wool. Wool is a pain in the butt to get enough of and most everyone needs at least a few stacksof it for first aid while tailors need huge amounts. Everything else is very easily farmable if you decide to coddle your babies to that extent.