What happened to Xunlai chests?
I’ve thought about this same question and the answer that made most sense to me, lore wise, was that the dragons affected the magical link between the source in Cantha and chests across Tyria.
This conclusion raised several questions, though. Why haven’t the Asura managed to reverse-engineer that magical technology? Did they even try? If not, why the hell not?
There is a Xunlai Chest in GW2, two if I remember right. Go to Eye of the North, and look around.
From a relatively old interview:
Ree SoesbeeRee Soesbee: The Xunlai and the Zaishen orders still exist in Guild Wars 2, but hold positions of significantly less prominence than they once did. We can’t tell you much about account storage, banking, and so forth, but we can say that their ties to Cantha have been mostly lost, due to the severing of all contact between the northern and southern continents because of the rise of Orr.
http://www.guildmag.com/guildmag-issue-1-qa-with-ree-soesbee
Basically, the magic which linked Xunlai Chests together has been lost when they lost contact with Cantha, so they don’t have to ability to make contracts and the like with how they once did.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Why haven’t the Asura managed to reverse-engineer that magical technology? Did they even try? If not, why the hell not?
They weren’t affected by losing them, so they probably don’t care.
There is a Xunlai Chest in GW2, two if I remember right. Go to Eye of the North, and look around.
There are two chests there; however as relates to the question of this thread, they don’t supply any answers. If you interact with those chests, it says they’re magically sealed. You would need to speak to a Xunlai agent to have an account. But since there aren’t any agents around you can’t access the contents.
So it would seem that after the dragons awoke, banking was just one of the many things that changed over the course of 250 years.
My assumption is that the present-day bankers are derived from the Xunlai guild and the bank chests are a modern day version of the Xunlai chests. (They certainly work the same way, you deposit items into one of them and can get them out of any of the others.)
I haven’t seen anything official but I would assume they’re restricted to the major cities either because of a lack of staff (at least staff willing to work in remote and dangerous places) or because the chests are hard to make these days (maybe they needed materials unique to or more common in Cantha, like jade and amber) and they want to keep them where the majority of people can reach them.
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”