Auction House, possible improvement

[Riggs]

While linking the auction house was a great idea, i think maybe it would be good to go further.

Many of us are fed up not been able to get mid level gear and mostly this is because people put it up, its not sold and gets returned, to over come this maybe we could

1. increase the period items will remain for sale on the auction house to say 2 real life weeks
2. Remove all tax on armor and weapons for selling items on the auction under level 75

Any thoughts?

[Jackastheripper]

How about just letting us put more than 7 things up. Then people won't be so picky about not putting things up that aren't really going to make them as much money as other things in their inventory. I am not suggesting unlimited, but more than 7. I think 1 is a good idea but 2 weeks is a little long. 2 is great though, although I guess the tax may (or may not) keep people from just running the prices up on everything.

[Korpg]

Tax/gil supply and supply/demand are my basic answers.

Removing any tax limits Square Enix's ability to remove gil from circulation. In case you didn't know, having too much of a currency makes that currency worthless (for example, see Zimbabwe and pre-WWII Germany). Having the tax is the most effective way for SE to remove currency, possibly removing as much as 2-3 million gil each day. Although, the value of gil also depends on actual demand of gil, and demand of gil is probably at an all time low at the moment.

As for putting more than 7 items on AH, it would increase the amount of consumable items (which is probably what about 75% of items on AH now anyway) to be sold, which would lower the price of consumable items and create lower profits to crafters in the game. Yes, your toolbags will go down in price, but people will stop crafting when they aren't getting as much back for the time spent crafting. Some people might actually quit because they are bored with all the extra free time they don't spend on crafting items, and that is not good for a dying game.

It is all about supply/demand on both situations, and probably why SE won't change their current system. It is not broken, so why try to fix it?

[RAIST]

They already posted shortly after announcing the merger that they are going to monitor data flow to see if they can't ease the restriction they put on the number of listings allowed. This was stated to have happened partly because of an issue with data flow when there were seperate AH's--querying the multiple tables was causing congestion issues on the servers. The general thought was by consolidating the tables, they cut back all that traffic and will be able to restore the listing count with out much impact to stability. But Korpg brings up another point that may also being considered as well--just what kind of impact would it have on the markets in the long run.

[Korpg]

In the absolute long run, nothing will change if they increase the amount of listings from 7 to 10.

Well, prices might be a little higher and there might be a smaller supply of certain items, but in the whole scale of economy, nothing will be affected.

Overall consumables will be higher priced, Overall equipment/weapons will be lower priced, which all evens out in the middle.