Recently I found out from a friend that the account of one of officers in her guild had been hacked.  21000 gold and all the guild bank items was taken, and anyone who could be was kicked.

Hopefully they get most of what they lost recovered, and their leadership wise up and make everyone with enhanced guild bank privileges get an authenticator.  The incident did get me thinking however about the benefits of hoarding gold in a guild bank.

21000 isn’t that much for a player to have, especially not one with multiple characters.  But that’s in the context of a game that has some pretty big player-focused gold sinks:

• 20k for a Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth
• 11k for a fully upgraded Band of the Kirin Tor
• 6400 for an epic flying mount and the ability to ride it in Northrend
• 12k for four 24-slot bags (in patch 3.3)

None of these upgrades are required, and none of them really improve your performance in a raid (save perhaps your utility going up a bit if you can carry a few more consumables)

So what does a guild need gold for?  I’ll assume we’re talking about an “average” raiding guild – one that does somewhere between 9 and 15 hours or raiding per week.  I’ll assume that you don’t pay for all your raider’s repairs – perhaps one repair cycle per raider per week after a particularly brutal raid, or a capped stipend per member per raid.  Let’s say that it comes out to a maximum of 2000 gold per week.  I’ve never been in a guild that was even that generous – keeping up with repairs was always the member’s responsibility, and in today’s WoW really shouldn’t be a burden for anyone who can spend an hour outside of raiding per week running daily quests.

You may need to maintain a stock of gems and consumables for use during raids, but for the most part these can be supplied by gatherers within the guild.  Even allowing for a few supplementary AH purchases, let’s say that your cash burn rate is around 3000g per week.  Again, this is vastly more than for any guild I’ve been in, but perhaps I’ve just been drawn to miserly company in the past.

Taking the example of the guild that was hacked, do you need to have seven weeks of cash reserves on hand?  Where did the gold come from?  Presumably from selling BoE items that dropped in raids.  The guild as an entity unto itself doesn’t make any money – leaving gold in a guild bank doesn’t accrue interest (wouldn’t that be wonderful, if horribly unbalanced?).  The earnings come from the activities of the members, and stockpiling large amounts of gold beyond what is required for the next few weeks of activities just doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.

Obviously there are times when you do want to stockpile – when content is on farm and you’re preparing for a stint of progression raiding (such as the current lead up to patch 3.3).  But for the most part it seems like the gold should either be redistributed or reinvested in the guild.

(more) Reinvestment...

Tags: auction house, authenticator, burn rate, consumables, dividend, gold, guild bank, Raiding, stipend, stock