Next on Warcraft Hoarders

One drawback to playing the auction house  is it just exacerbates the challenge to find enough space for everything you want to hold on to.  Much of the motivation in MMOs is acquiring new gear.  And players often want to hold on to gear.  Storage within any MMO is just a matter of digits in a database.  While memory and hard drive costs continue to come down in the industry, there is a balance to strike between game play and real world costs. 
 
What does this mean for auctioneers and crafters?  Basically that space is at a premium in the game, but luckily there are a few solutions that can really help you manage your vast amounts of stock.


Each expansion has seen incremental increases in the number of slots standard and profession bags provide.  With Cataclysm Blizzard introduced Void storage which is sort of a long term storage for items you are not going to need to access often.  While void storage is a solution for the question of where to put that old tier gear you no longer wear, but want to hold on to, it does not come cheaply. 

The cheapest place to keep a lot of stock when you do not have enough bag slots for it is simply to leave it in the in-game mail system.  It consists of mailing from one character to another.  There are a few risks, mainly you can only bounce items back and forth twice I believe.  Items left for too long in the mail run the risk of being deleted.  

Use of an addon such as Altoholic (http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info8533-Altoholic.html) allows you to keep tabs on how much mail you have waiting to be opened on various alts.  


The next easiest way to get additional storage space is to roll an additional character.  These additional characters are referred to as Bank-alts or Mules.  Basically you equip them out with bags and use their bank to store materials.  If you actually level the character and skill up their tradeskills to compliment your main character’s this can be the start of a gold-making empire.


Another solution is to buy guilds.  I have been doing this lately as people have been advertising low level guilds in trade cheaply.  While I could just make another guild, it is actually easier and often cheaper to buy a guild with bank tabs already paid for.  

It also allows you to put characters on multiple accounts in the same guild granting them access to crafting materials.  I have moved my mining and blacksmithing alts to one guild to simplify the flow of materials as i am leveling them.   

 The above suggestions should tide most of us over until Blizzard decided to give us more bank slots or increase the number of tabs available to guild banks.