I’m really liking the graduated Guild bank system, with multiple tiers and individual access controls for each tier. However, the possibility for abuse does really exist. I’m referring to authorized Guild members “cleaning out” Guild vaults. This can happen for a variety of reasons: greed, miscommunication, even potentially sabotage. Recently one of our trusted members’ accounts was hacked and after stripping his toon, our Guild vault was also cleaned out.
I can think of some straightforward count-measures which could have prevented this and similar incidents, and I’m sure if the community picks up on this thread, they will offer plenty of other good suggestions, many of which have been successfully implemented in other MMOs, some which might be entirely original.
1. Daily withdrawal limits on a per rank basis. I believe this feature would mitigate 90% of the issues we have seen in-game without any kind of massive systemic overhaul. The essence of the concept is that officers can assign withdrawal limits to each rank of guild member from none (deposit only) to unlimited, and anything in-between. Not only will this effectively curtail any mass-cleanouts by unscrupulous members or hacked accounts (other than hacked officer accounts, of course), it will also help provide reasonable limits and guidelines for members wishing to withdraw from the Guild storage to help level up crafting or achieve titles, such as consumable related achievements.
The development roadmap for this feature could eventually consider differentiating between, and providing customizable limits for: currency, equipment, crafting materials, consumables.
2. Guild storage log sorting, ie “Wall of Shame”. This would be a relatively simple enhancement to the existing Storage Log UI: the ability to aggregate withdrawals by user and rank users according to their usage of the Guild storage. This could effectively highlight users that are heavily (ab)using the storage. This solution has all sorts of nice enhancement potential in the development roadmap, from hiding / restricting ranks from the list, to sorting by withdrawal/contribution ratio, to allowing heavy offenders above a certain threshold to be exposed more publicly on the Guild message or elsewhere. I’m sure the community could really run with this one. As an alternative to imposing hard limits, this would allow the Guild to better self-moderate its behaviour (though it does not in any way protect from stripping)
3. Withdrawal revocation by officer. The concept here is that authorized guild leaders can effectively “undo” Guild storage withdrawals. I’m documenting it he because I’ve see the idea mentioned elsewhere in this forum, but I personally think the solution is so complex as to be unmanageable, particularly once the withdrawn items disappear into the economy – salvaged, resold, what have you. Are you going to penalize the guy who bought the item on TP? Or un-craft a piece of armour crafted with materials salvaged from a “stolen” Guild vault? Unpracticable.
I hope these ideas trigger some lively discussion. My guild is generally in favour of trusting its members and being open and sharing. But we are approaching 1000 members (across two sister guilds – see our suggestions re:alliances elsewhere in these forums) and the administrative and management of that many members could use some help via carefully crafted features.
— Garmon [MARA]