A general discussion about clan banks without complaining

[Malik2]

As clan banks have become a regular feature of the regnum clan community.

As they were used to pool resources among members and encouraged teamwork.

As clans, as organizations, have no way to effeciently store items they find.

It would be an excellent idea if the community could take time to reflect how these changes will impact the clan systems as it is now, does it strengthen the clan system or weaken it, how will your clan cope with these changes etc.

It would be nice if we can have this discussion in the open on the general discussion board.

[_Arwen_]

I'll make my first post in defense of NGD and perhaps later I'll post my thoughts on the other side even though most of you will say it anyway.

1) Clan banks clutter up RO's database making maintenance more difficult.
- If every clan has 3 characters for banks (some have more but lets stick with 3 for now) and there are only 20 clans per realm, you have an extra 60 characters in the databases. Add to this each bank containing around 125 - 150 items, now you have 9,000 items to keep track of. All of this adds to the complexity and size of the databases in charge of keeping player info, not to mention it incorrectly inflates the number of characters/accounts on the servers giving NGD bad information which they may need to use correctly plan server hardware upgrades and software changes.

This does not even include clans that had banks and have since died but banks not deleted so these numbers could easily be double what I've calculated.

2) Clan banks can be a cause of dispute with players who donate items then leave the clan.
- I'm not sure if this is a big issue or not, but if someone donates an item to the bank, then is either kicked out of the clan or leaves on their own, their item may now be "lost". Perhaps these players email NGD and now NGD has to deal with an issue with a "system" that they don't endorse causing loss in productivity and time.

3) Probably most importantly is the fact that clan banks kill commerce in the Regnum world.
- This is the reason I feel is the largest driving force behind this change. For better or for worse, clan banks kill the economy in Regnum since you don't need to search for and buy new items when you can just get them from the bank. If NGD intends to add crafting in the near (or distant) future, there needs to be some sort of economy to facilitate the trade of goods created by crafting. Now that there's no place to store your items (beyond a few spots in stashes) you may be forced to sell that new sword you just dropped but have no need for.

However, that being said it's also up to NGD to make it easy for the players to put their items up for sale and so far we have zero support for that. What Regnum needs in order to help its economy grow is some sort of "Auction House" or "Trading Post" to let people place items up for sale/auction and automatically exchange items when a sale is accepted whether or not a user is online. Another thing that is needed is for NGD to fix the return price of items. Currently you only get 10% to 40% of the money back that an item is worth when you sell to a merchant. While this is good because it forces you to try to sell items to other players, I think it would make sense to increase the return rate to 60 or 70 percent since you normally can't sell normal weapons/armor to other players. Until this happens, the RO economy will never flourish and banks will continue to exist in some form.

4) Last but not least, keep in mind its very possible NGD has some Clan enhancements coming in an upcoming release that includes a clan bank and all we have to do is wait patiently.


I hope you all can keep in mind that there are other possible reasons for this change other than to "kill" clan banking.

Sincerely,
Arwen

[AariEv]

The problem is that some clans will now start making more accounts for their banks in order to accommodate for the new update. This will clutter the database even further

[Revolverxxx]

most of the players dont understand the problems these clan banks had. did you know that the really overburdened characters dont display all the items they are carrying. im talking about a carry weight of 1500+/250 etc.

we had a problem in our clan bank where a player was looking for a specific pauldron he donated a while back. It was never given out so we were definate it was there. One of our clan leaders logged on to the clan bank and looked for it.... couldnt find it. the characters weight was like ~1200/250 (not the exact number but more or less). he relogged onto the character, the weight was now ~1340/250. still no pauldrons. after relogging multiple times (i remember logging off and coming back and they were still busy at it) they eventually found it, i cant remember the exact weight but it was somewhere around the high 2500/250 or more.

my point is that characters are not meant to be overburdened and by storing that much items on one character is pushing the limits of what was originally intended so the response is very unpredictable. This update is good, but it needs counter update to fascilitate some kind of clan storage

[Anpu]

There wouldn't be any DB cluttering nor level one chars as improvised banks if NGD first finished with clans before moving to developing other stuff. Now dual wielding has priority over clan systems. They are rushing a lot with game features, leaving them half finished and buggy.

Also, for this year, we can probably forget any kind of clan update, as they announced what they are going to do this year (thread where Kailer explained they won't have time to take a look into Evasion because schedule is busy). If they don't have time for one of the biggest problem in Regnum, which created tons of threads (just like lack of clan banks created tons of level 1 chars), I personally don't expect anything for clan either.

[Malik2]

Aaris is right, where some clans may drop their clan banking, others will end up with multiple lvl 10 or 15 probabaly barbarian banks to hold items, so instead of 3 lvl 1 characters we will be looking at 30 or 40 individual characters to hold all the items.

Arwen makes good points.

Although I also agree with Anpu that if there was some clan enhancement coming we would have been informed.

I know plenty of people who have never tried to sell an item on realm chat becasue they just gave it to the clan, since we can't save for the clan, will this change turn realm chat into more of "lets make a deal" than it already is?

[Mr_Egg]

Originally Posted by Anpu

There wouldn't be any DB cluttering nor level one chars as improvised banks if NGD first finished with clans before moving to developing other stuff. Now dual wielding has priority over clan systems. They are rushing a lot with game features, leaving them half finished and buggy.

Also, for this year, we can probably forget any kind of clan update, as they announced what they are going to do this year (thread where Kailer explained they won't have time to take a look into Evasion because schedule is busy). If they don't have time for one of the biggest problem in Regnum, which created tons of threads (just like lack of clan banks created tons of level 1 chars), I personally don't expect anything for clan either.

Agree. NGD should stop trying to add new features until they fix what's broken. Even though this work might not be as interesting for them, it will benefit them in the long run as they will have less players permanently ragequitting due to massive levels of evades/resists/positional bug/lag/etc... because lets face it, it is frustrating.

Originally Posted by Malik2

I know plenty of people who have never tried to sell an item on realm chat becasue they just gave it to the clan, since we can't save for the clan, will this change turn realm chat into more of "lets make a deal" than it already is?

As someone else said in some other thread... the realm chat is the home shopping channel of regnum. Maybe if NGD added a trade chat channel it might be easier.... or, like people keep suggesting, some kind of auction system. I can't imagine it being much work to add one extra realm-wide chat channel and label it "trade" though...

Originally Posted by BigManOnCampus

Clans *CAN STILL STORE ITEMS USING BANK CHARACTERS*, just use the stashes and not the inventory. It's not difficult. With xim you can expand the stashes to up to 50 items, that's a maximum of 350 items per account. If you ever had more than 350 items in a clan account before, then shame on you for not sharing with your realm mates.

Yeah, but who the hell wants to spent ridiculous amounts of xim on their clan banks? I mean, they don't even want to spend time grinding them, what's the point in putting xim into them?

This would also mean relocating banks to places which are less convenient for players just for stash access, and would require keeping quite a lot of gold in the banks and cataloguing items so people know exactly what they want.

Even so, the largest they can increase the stash size to is 50 items per character and 50 more on the account, nowhere near enough, I'd assume, for the majority of clans..... and yes, Arwen's maths is better than mine if you're expanding the account size too.

Originally Posted by Gideon_Slack

On the one hand, it sucks for clans to loose banks. On the other hand, it may be good for realm cohesion. (We'll have to wait and see). And, clans can still store the absolute best of the stuff in their mules (and in stash too).

That's a good point, a few times I've seen someone on realm chat buying x item, and I'm thinking "hmmmm, there's something similar in our banks...". If clans were strictly limited to what they can store, then maybe someone would've still had that item and could've sold it, and everyone would be happier.


I can kind of see where NGD is coming from on this, I mean, clan banks could be classed as against the rules anyway...

Originally Posted by GENERAL TERMS OF USE

2. One person is only allowed to have one account.
3. It is not allowed to take over another user’s account.

And clan banks tend to be shared accounts...