According to Madisor from Spinebreaker Realm [US], the “Games for Windows” Magazine issued out a 13-page article covering upcoming content for World of Warcraft beyond patch 2.1.
Tom Chilton says there will be a Guild Bank, removing the need of creating alternate characters to bank guild items. Now there will be a special NPC at the banks aimed to store Guild items. Not just that. Certain players assigned a special rank or permission levels will be able to pay their repairs from guild bank funds via bank or repair-bots instead of paying with their own funds.
Certain level/rank can deposit directly into the guild bank, but no withdraw. Or a player with a different level permission can withdraw certain type of items, or certain amounts of items per day. Better yet, you can track all deposit and withdrawal transactions directly from the World of Warcraft Armory website to spot scammers who dissapear after a /gquit, on the fly.
Accounts can be banned if reported of stealing from the bank, since players and GMs can keep track of stealers more efficiently.
Blizzard is also adding in-game chat (VOIP) sometime after patch 2.1. Chilton said adding the feature to World of Warcraft allows to doing more interactive and flexible stuff that Teamspeak and Ventrillo doesn’t allow. For example, if someone asks for healing, instead of wasting time finding out who just talked on Voice chat, the in-game UI will blink the character name of who just talked as a signal—so that you know who to heal.
This really speeds up things, specially in critical Boss fights where wasting 8 seconds figuring these simple things may cause a wipe. For now Voice chat is limited to Party and Raid groups. General Channel Voice Chat is planned at a far later time. Implementing Voice Chat (VOIP) linked to UI (LUA) Scripting for visual coordination will certainly easy up communication among players of hardcore guilds and Pick up groups.
