Bank Alts: Guild Bank vs. Personal Storage
Silvermoon City Banker
With the release of guild banks, many bank alts have purchased them for extra space. They provide 96 slots per tab with up to 6 tabs available for purchase. So is it cheaper to have a new bank alt purchase a few tabs or just buy bags and bag slots from their personal banks? Lets find out…
Personal Bank Method
- 1st – 10 Silver
2nd – 1g
3rd – 10g
4th – 25g
5th – 25g
6th – 25g
7th – 25g
Total: 111.10g
- 16 Slot [Netherweave Bag] – 7g each x 11
Total: 77g
Slot Breakdown
- 28 Bank
112 Bank Slots
16 Backpack
64 Personal Bags
0 Guild Bank
Total Slots: 220
Price: 188g
Price per slot: .85g
Guild Bank Method
- Guild Charter – 10 Silver
1st – 100g
2nd – 250g
3rd – 500g
4th – 1000g
5th – 2500g
6th – 5000g
Total: 9350g
Slot Breakdown (Using 2 Tabs as an example)
- 28 Bank
0 Bank Slots
16 Backpack
0 Personal Bags
192 Guild Bank (96 per tab)
Total slots: 236
Price: 350.1g
Price per slot: 1.4g
From the results, you can see that purchasing bank slots and bags is cheaper than buying guild tabs. Even more so if you have the bags crafted as you only need netherweave cloth. Remember the guild bank method is a set price and does not change. It also scales terribly since the more tabs you buy, the greater the cost. By the time you buy all 6 tabs for 9350g, you are paying over 16g a slot! Lets say you use small 6 slot bags with the personal bank method, your still paying less per slot compared to the guild bank method.
Personally I have a combination of both, I like how the guild bank has all your items in one space compared to having all your personal bank slots open at once. I guess I could download a bag mod to fix this. Another reason I have both is I like having only one bank alt and do not like logging on to multiple characters. So when all my bags and slots became full on my bank alt, I ended up buying 2 bank tabs for more space. Some of you may only specialize in one particular market, so having item specific bags will be even cheaper when using the personal bank method. However some of you heavy auction house players will need more than the 200+ slots used in the examples above. Many of you probably have multiple bank alts already to handle the amount of items you move daily.
I hope this information helped you make a decision if you were just making your first bank alt or were considering one. Buying bags and personal bank slots are the way to go when you are starting out, then expand to a guild tabs if you need more space for that one bank alt.
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Keep an eye on trade, for some reason on my server (Thunderhorn EU, Alliance) people sell guilds with banks all the time. I brought a guild with 3 bank tabs for 50g (yes, 50g), and I’ve seen some since for around 150g — I wish I’d brought the ones I’ve seen since, I’d have masses of bank space!
And also, it’d be cheaper to just create multiple guilds if you didn’t see people selling them cheap, and buy the first 1, 2 or 3 tabs. A little inconvenient but you’d save tons of money!
Oh ya, forgot to add that. That happens fairly often, always a good buy if you happen to see one for sale. Thanks for the tip!
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to purchase 1 guild tab? Thats 100 g and its 96 slots. Buying all the bank spaces + bags would cost close to 200g for roughly the same amount of spaces. I could even purchase the first 2-3 bank spaces and bags for a lot less then just buying all the bank spaces.
Yes one guild tab would be a better deal than bags and personal slots.
A very interesting bit of math. Thanks!
But I would argue a *little*…
I wouldn’t really count personal bags as “storage” since they are ususally (for me at least) in use. If you eliminate them from the calculation for both systems of storage, the numbers still favors the personal bank system for 2 tabs, but your total REAL “long term storage” drops to only 156 slots, which is not really serviceable. (at least for anyone that plays the AH very much)
Regardless of my nitpicking, nice bit of work, and thanks again!
I just sold my old guild bank for 500G. It had 3 bank tabs and it sold in 2 minutes from my post in trade chat . so if u sell your guild tabs , i suggest u ask for half if not the entire amount of gold u spent on buying the tabs . goodluck
In my case, I use 2 accounts. My second account was at one time my cross faction trader account, and it still is. But now I also have a couple of same faction bankers there. With a guild tab I can easily transfer goods between these accounts without logging them both on simultaneously. Obviously, this won’t affect most people. But anyone who has multiple accounts should seriously consider the gbank option to easy transfer/storage.
[...] tab (at 2.5k .. ouch!), which might have been a (impulsive) mistake, considering the comparison by Warcraft Econ on cost per unit space between bank toons and guild [...]