A good banking system should be:
  1. Searchable (by name)
  2. Filterable (by slot of item, by level range, by binding)
  3. Sortable (by age of being in the bank, by name, by binding)
  4. In one place
  5. Responsive (you click and it doesn't take a minute to load whatever's next)


Unbelievably, all of the many current concurrent systems for storing items (except the auction house) fail at some or ALL of those basic functions (!). Updates have huge lists of new items and honestly it is sucking the fun out of the game trying to move them around. Either you throw them out when not using them and spend hours re-farming the same things if you want them again. You spend hours arranging them carefully on specific alts by your own sorting scheme, or you just have random piles of garbage on a lot of alts and spend hours searching. Playing just one build that uses one set of items and doesn't have to sort much is also popular I guess, or just giving up on storage and use whatever you find in a given life. None of these are ideal.

Recommendation:
  1. Leave inventory as it is, that's fine and we can organize as we see fit for things that are carried around.
  2. Replace the shared bank interface, the bank interface, the guild chests, the crafting storage, and the reincarnation cache with a single unified system.
  3. This system could very easily be adapted from the auction house system, which actually succeeds at basic functionality.
  4. It would be possible and tempting to include both auction houses inside this functionality too, but might lead to errors that lose people favourite items or spending shards when they didn't mean to etc so probably best not to.


In the new banking system, changes from the auction house interface:
  1. The "duration" just counts up from when it was put in the bank instead of down as in the auction house.
  2. Add in deposit/withdraw buttons next to the current balance displayed at the bottom, and make this current balance refer to what's in the shared bank (aka platinum vault)
  3. Instead of current price/buyout, there is a "available to" column, which for each item displays the current status of the item, which you can change with a dropdown menu, options of "Character", "Account", or "Guild". If an item has a binding status that would preclude one of those options, they aren't available (e.g. you can't make a BTC item available for anything other than character, but you could set a BTA item to be either character or account)
  4. To deposit an item, you can just drag and drop it onto the auction house. Double click or click and drag to withdraw directly into inventory rather than sending a mail!
  5. Either at the top of the screen or at the side, it can display something like:
    150 of 160 character, 200 of 210 account, 100 of 250 guild, 1000 of 1400 ingredient
    Equating to what would be classified under existing character bank, shared account, guild chests, and crafting storage.



Thorny issues with the various options available:
  1. Defaults availability:
    • Stored as an ingredient if possible, account if not, BTC otherwise. Guild only by deliberate choice. - I think this is simplest, but pros and cons each way.
    • Make deposits have to happen through a specific "deposit" page where availability is chosen
  2. Cosmetic items:
    • Regular account or BTC items, but they DO have a separate sorting category in the left hand menu along with weapons etc, and categories for each type of cosmetic within those
    • Separate category entirely with their own counter, purchased independently
    • Not included in the banking interface, cosmetic options moved to a cosmetics closet available any time in any quest just like pets - I think this is the best solution
  3. Reincarnation cache (what to do when a character reincarnates):
    • Everything in their inventory, on their person, and "available to character" gets stored in a separate character "reincarnation cache" which only the character can see just like "available to character", and they can move things out of that status via the dropdown but not back to it. Essentially maintaining current functionality of reincarnation cache but searchable etc.
    • Put all items in a characters inventory into the bank with "available to character" set. Allow overflow of this e.g. 250 of 160 character, overflow just means items can only be withdrawn, not deposited (if choosing this item, need to sell a lot more character banking space) - I think this is the best solution.
    • Sell enough cheap extra banking space to make up the current size limits of cache + inventory + bank, move things to the bank and do NOT allow overflow, refuse to let a character reincarnate until there is enough space available.
  4. Ingredients:
    • Convert all "crafting storage" slots into regular account storage, but have ingredients only use up 1/100th of a slot or so? - I think this is the best solution, much cleaner
    • Have as a separate category for storage alongside account, using the current purchased values for crafting storage