Your bank alt might not be able to participate in epic battles or join elite raids, but there’s one thing she can do as good as anybody else, and that’s role playing.
When Scorpyo and I started to play World of Warcraft, we created characters, tested different classes, deleted characters and started all over again.
Little by little we discovered that some of our characters had different personalities. Small things at first, but some of them evolved.
We were on a normal realm, not a role playing (RP) realm, but role playing came spontaneous from time to time.
And so, all of our characters go through things like hard work (mining, blacksmithing), fighting, killing, digging, get nails dirty by picking flowers, getting bloody hands by skinning, sewing clothes and fighting, fighting and fighting.
Our characters grew up and got slow mounts, then faster running mounts, and then finally flying mounts.
They could get around and explore the world, discover secret places, climb mountains, and dive down in frozen rivers.
While all that fun was going on, our AH chars staid in one place, going from mail box to auction house to bank and back again.
And the AH chars were only called for, when their older sisters or brothers wanted gold, or had old junk to send them to sell.
Our AH chars started out by being convenient level 1 characters without personality, but grew into persons with their own lives.
These characters had never had a blister in their life – if not for counting money.
They never had their hands dirty from soil or blood.
Their clothes never had a scratch from hard fighting.
They just lived there, in a main city, doing nothing but business.
So obviously, it became a major problem to break a nail, and of course, whenever somebody wanted gold for a noble course like getting to learn how to fly, the AH chars would object. They themselves did well without flying. Why should they offer their hard-owned gold to pay for that?
You can do role playing on a normal server, but you should probably hold it to guild chat in that case, and in /say if you’re close to friends.
On a RP server, /say and /yell should be used to be in character (IC), so you can live out your AH chars personality freely.
That would also be really cool in Trade channel, if you tell a story about why you’re selling your pet fish Fishy, because you need food for your starving sisters, and one of them is heavily injured and in need of treatment, so you hope somebody will adopt him and give him a new home, and he answers to the name of “Joe”, instead of just saying “[Fishy] in AH now”.
In “real” RP, there’s something known as “God-mode”, and that’s when you play God and take over other character’s fate. That’s frowned upon, to say the least.
You should only be yourself and not go God-mode as an AH char, either.
So no: “Superbanker put the cutest little goldfish for sale, and Wankerjoe eagerly grabbs it and pays the 1,000 gold with pleasure.”
Wankerjoe might not agree to this.
If you want to read more about role playing, I recommend this link: http://www.wowwiki.com/Roleplaying. From there you can jump to more sources about RP.
Now go make some gold or something.