Lockdown: tips to a secure guild bank.

Post by Ghoso

After looking around on the net, I see many forums having several topics about how their bank was robbed. I myself have experienced this unfortunate event with our guild. this was a while ago, and even before then we had a pretty secure protocol for our bank, and the only reason we suffered this common mishap was because of a breach of this protocol. So here are my tips to running a successful bank. Many of them may seem like common sense, though not every guild is run the same way. let these be a suggestion of how to keep your bank secure.

1: The GM should be the ONLY person with full access. if you don't plan to give anyone else access, you can stop reading and your bank is the most secure it can be. Skip to part 7 for more.

2: If partial access is given to officers, be sure you know your officers well enough to give them this responsibility. Personally our guild is a couple years old and we only have 4 officers, 1 of which is the GMs girlfriend of several years while the rest of us have been in the guild for well over a year. if you don't have anyone like that in your guild, then don't make an exception and just wait it out till you feel comfortable with someone.

In addition each officer should only have access to a fraction of the available funds, such as a 500g limit out of the 10k available, what ever you feel comfortable with. Do not give full access. Also a stack limit should be imposed. this number is best found with watching the guild for about a week, and see how many members need withdrawals, average that number for a per-day basis and divide that among your officers (this is assuming your officers are in charge of giving out items to the rest of the guild). this way they can have sufficient access to help other members without compromising too much wealth. Again if you don't know your officers well enough, keep these privileges to yourself.

3. This is a common scam: if you have one of your officers whisper you with a new toon, asking "hey get me an invite and promote me, ill be leveling this toon now" you should be very suspicious. ask that person to get on vent to confirm their identity. In fact, any promotion of power should be confirmed over vent, you should know this persons voice by now to trust them. if you do not have vent, you must figure out a way to be absolutely sure this character is who they say they are. for instance, ask them to log onto their main and whisper them a code, then back to the alt and whisper it again. I may even recommend doing both voice + code.

Otherwise, I recommend imposing a "only one officer toon" rule and simply say sorry, Suchandsuch is your officer toon. if you need the bank, log on that one. This also prevents an officer from having 2x the access of other officers.

4. No new member should have any access. Give them a probationary period before you trust anyone with a single gold or bank slot. Otherwise I would advise only the GM and officers have any type of withdraw access in the first place. if a new member is turned off by this rule and quits, they were probably looking for free loot anyway.

If you do give your members any type of bank access (even 1 withdrawal a day) EXPECT to have drama. I guarantee you there will be a couple people using that 1 withdrawal each and every day for personal gain. only give members access if you are a rich and more than reasonably generous GM. Even if you don't care if people take 1 thing out a day, other members might.

5. Set a limit to deposits. An easy way for a thief to hide their tracks is for him/her to deposit 100's of blacksmith hammers into the spaces where your valuables used to be with an alt in the guild (this toon is usually not known to be an alt, everyone assumes its a seperate player) This is also motivation for whoever is the offender to quit the guild ASAP and steal nothing else as they realize their name is on the log still.

having both withdrawals and deposits on a limit will give you more time to see what has happened yourself and take care of the offender (kick them out) before more damage is done

6. If someone robs your bank, then proceed to tell you there is nothing a Game Master can do about it, this is a lie. Game masters will resolve the incident within a few days (depending on server/influxes of tickets). Unfortunately don't count on the offender to be perma-banned unless they have done this several times to other guilds before. You will have your things back, but game master probably wont tell you who did it because of privacy agreements in the TOA. This is why section 5 is a good idea.

Be sure to save that person to your friends/ignore list. This is because even if they change their name, the change will show in your lists so you don't invite them back

7. One of the best ways to have your bank robbed is not the fault of your guildies, but the clever coding of crooks who want to get your login information via spywear. if you want to be safe yourself, avoid gold sites, people linking anything in wow related forums (especially porn links) and above all, don't share your login info with anyone. ANYONE.

And please ask the same of your officers and anyone else with access.

EDIT (additions from others)

My Guild deviates a bit from this. We have a single "Deposit Only Tab", and every now and then an officer will sort out all the items in there into the proper tabs. We've never had any issues with the guild bank because of our recruitment policy which focuses on the person rather than the character, guild drama is a once every few months thing rather than a constant issue (and most instances of guild drama don't last long).

this is a good idea if you want to keep a semi-open gbank but still have security.
another variation would to allows players to give items to each other freely on one tab (limited deposits AND withdraws), and at the leisure of officers those unused or perhaps more valuable items can be absorbed into the banks locked tabs for added security.

If anyone else want to add tips, or has issues with my opinions, please comment. Make the honest wow community stronger and stop those who profit from theft.

Post by xaratherus

If you do give your members any type of bank access (even 1 withdrawal a day) EXPECT to have drama. I guarantee you there will be a couple people using that 1 withdrawal each and every day for personal gain. only give members access if you are a rich and more than reasonably generous GM. Even if you don't care if people take 1 thing out a day, other members might.

This is the only part that I have a comment on, to be honest. Otherwise, it looks great.

My comment: Our guild has a semi-open bank policy. We have a full complement of bank tabs; one of them is an "Officers only" tab, while the rest are open to any full guild member (we have a sort of probationary rank) with a withdrawal limit of 10 withdrawals a day.

We've rarely had any drama regarding the bank - because we very specifically outline the bank rules in the guild policy, and kick anyone who violates it. We were, in fact, perhaps a little overbearing on outlining it, because we wanted folks to know that there was little question as to how we expected the bank to be used. One of the officers reviews the bank logs once every few days to ensure that no one is siphoning away the bank's stuff, and anything that has a high resale value goes on the Officers Only tab, and is available only by request.

So it is possible to have a semi-open bank without a lot of drama. Just make sure everyone knows the rules before they join, and they have no one but themselves to blame if they break 'em.

Post by 112770

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Post by Ghoso

Bump - i think its important.

Post by Cantras

Heh.

My guild has very few guild bank rules, but the only trouble we have is people donating too much stuff-- in the "I have to go clean it out" sense, not the "onoes hiding tracks" sense.

Now, we did change it so money could only be withdrawn for repairs, because we did have one person where you'd see the log and he'd withdrawn the max (admittedly, only 50) on 3-4 alts. For most tabs, I think we're limited to 7 withdrawals per day (Our tabs being Equipables, Consumables, tradeskill mats, reagents, silly stuff, and overflow, which is actually mostly quest items and uncooked meat)-- which is still quite a bit.

Our officers are long-time members. We're good friends.
Our alts have to be approved by application-- we can write in, oh, this is Cantras, skip answering a lot, but we still have to talk about what we intend to do with the character and give our email address.

Very new members get less privileges, but they're usually upgraded in a week or so.

Deposit limits... maybe that'd put an end to my having to clean out 50 inscriptions or 20 fountain coins. >.>

Now, we did have someone get hacked and get through a fair amount of the equippables tab, but we got that all back thank god.

I guess I'm saying, another method to not have guild bank trouble is to not let people you have to babysit into the guild. Why are you letting this person in if you can't trust them to keep their hands to themselves? You think that someone you have to keep an eye on for %^&*!@ry is a good addition to your guild makeup, or your raiding team?
eeurgh.

~Cantras
<Mellonea> Quartermaster

Post by Falrinn

My Guild deviates a bit from this. We have a single "Deposit Only Tab", and every now and then an officer will sort out all the items in there into the proper tabs. We've never had any issues with the guild bank because of our recruitment policy which focuses on the person rather than the character, guild drama is a once every few months thing rather than a constant issue (and most instances of guild drama don't last long).

Lockdown: tips to a secure guild bank.

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