Please Revise the Auction House!!!!

I don't know about the majority of you but, I make most of my money off of the Auction House and I think that being forced to pay $1 for an extra 7 AH slots is a bit harsh. Most MMO's today don't even limit the number the items that you can place on the AH house and the one's that do usually have pretty steep limits closer to 20 or so.

Also, I think it needs to be taken out of the dark ages. I think that instead of just putting up an item and waiting for someone to buy it, I think you should be able to put up buy orders. Similar to how you can buy stuff in FFXIV's bazaar system or at least how it was the week I played FFXIV. This would be a boon to crafters that could just set up a buy order for how many of an item they need and just tweek the going price every day or so.

And lastly, I think that whole having to take an order down to change anything about it is a bit out-dated too. Why can't I just go into a little screen and adjust the price and pay a little extra tax for it? I mean these are features that a standard in a lot of MMO's but due to FFXI's age seem to be overlooked. I know that there's more dire, "balancing" issues at hand but I think ease and accessibilty in the Auction House isn't too much to ask for.

They already said that upping the AH even one slot could be disastrous for the server. Don't forget unlike the newer games this one was programmed years ago and poorly at that.

You can use 100% of a CPU easily with poorly written code, it's not much different on a server.

The fact that they can support 10 mules posting 7 items each, but it causes a server meltdown if one character posts 8 items is pretty laughable. Funny stuff.

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

The fact that they can support 10 mules posting 7 items each, but it causes a server meltdown if one character posts 8 items is pretty laughable. Funny stuff.

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it wouldn't be one character.

Seeing as how the vast majority only sell items on one account, and use mule accounts simply for storage the number would be tiny compared to EVERY single person on a server gaining one more slot.

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Originally Posted by Daniel_Hatcher

it wouldn't be one character.

Seeing as how the vast majority only sell items on one account, and use mule accounts simply for storage the number would be tiny compared to EVERY single person on a server gaining one more slot.

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I wonder if that's more stress on the server than having 1,000 mules logged on 24/7 with a bazaar full of crap items on every server?

Going from 7 to 8 is potentilly a 14-15% increase in data transferred per character--that is potentially every time someone queries the AH system for a status, as well as an increase in the volume of what is being bought/listed as well, so potentially an instant 14% increase to server load. Even if it wouldn't have a noticeable impact at the server level, there is still the issue with how it will affect data transfer to/from the clients. They are still trying to support dialup after all, then there are the issues with the high latency and bandwidth throttling. Remember, this game is not sectioned off regionally---some people are dealing with upwards of 200 ms latency to JP at times, and the ISP's over there (as well as other regions and their strange issues like we recently saw with BT/O2) have congestion issues and connections are choked down at times as well. Those other regionally divided games do not face such challenges as bad as we do with FFXI.

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

I wonder if that's more stress on the server than having 1,000 mules logged on 24/7 with a bazaar full of crap items on every server?

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Those mules aren't really affecting the server at all... just the clients who can't dumb down their graphics settings when strolling through Port Jeuno.

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

The fact that they can support 10 mules posting 7 items each, but it causes a server meltdown if one character posts 8 items is pretty laughable. Funny stuff.

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The only thing laughable is your argument. You know that if they upped it, even to 8, the only thing that would change is we would know have 10 mules posting 8 items. Its not like upping the AH slots would reduce mules. Ppl would just npc one less item and throw it up. (Which would be nice actually.)

The one thing mentioned that i did like tho, would be the ability to change the price of an item without having to take it down entirely and re-listing it. That would come in handy to.

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

The fact that they can support 10 mules posting 7 items each, but it causes a server meltdown if one character posts 8 items is pretty laughable. Funny stuff.

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If having more than 7 items on AH causes server problems, they seriously need to hire competent programmers...

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Originally Posted by Behemothx

If having more than 7 items on AH causes server problems, they seriously need to hire competent programmers...

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ill work for half what they're paying one of their current team

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Originally Posted by Juilan

ill work for half what they're paying one of their current team

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So you want to work on ffxiv too? lol

Anyway since most of us do have at least 2-3 mules I wonder what the actually player count truly is. If you consider 2-3 mules per player and there are 19,714 active characters on Odin (according to ffxiah) that leaves only 5k-ish actual ppl playing. Then if you take into consideration how many 'players' bots, rmt, bazaar mules, and the ppl that actually do have 4+ mules that would bring that number down further. Kinda makes you wonder...

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Originally Posted by Behemothx

If having more than 7 items on AH causes server problems, they seriously need to hire competent programmers...

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For games today yea. But ppl need to stop thinking about programming today and truly remember this game is a decade old. Things were a lot different back then. It was also their first MMO like this, so they had no past experience, and their wernt a million other examples to look at like their are today.

It might sux for a lot of things now, but they can only work within their old code as it is. The only other option to be to rewrite the whole damn thing (maybe). And that ain't going to happen with a game thats already 10 years old.

Well, maybe after FFXIV 2.0 flukes because no one is going to buy it except 4 PS3 users, maybe then FFXI will see some revisions. The nice thing about programming is that it's like modeling clay that never dries. You can always go back and rework what you already have. I'm sure after a decade the number of redundancies in that coding is astronomical.

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Originally Posted by Godofgods

The only thing laughable is your argument. You know that if they upped it, even to 8, the only thing that would change is we would know have 10 mules posting 8 items. Its not like upping the AH slots would reduce mules. Ppl would just npc one less item and throw it up. (Which would be nice actually.)

The one thing mentioned that i did like tho, would be the ability to change the price of an item without having to take it down entirely and re-listing it. That would come in handy to.

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It wasn't really an argument. More of an observation. Obviously just adding 1 more slot would do nothing. It would have to be a large expansion to make an impact on the number of mules. That's why it's so funny that they can't even add one slot, when they should be able to add 10? or 20? infinite? by now.

Just think about how strange and neglected that the code has to be...

guess everyone has forgotten about the trouble they had at launch....which prompted them to reduce the AH listing cap in the first place. Whether that is because of the increased load on the server or potential connection/transfer issues over the internet---there is a precedent for congestion issues with a higher listing cap, probably why they are apprehensive about increasing it.

{Edit:}
For those that don't remember, a quick google for FFXI's update history came up with this page right away:
http://zeusls.llima.net/download/ffxiupdatehistory.html

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02/12/19
おまかせPTが実装されるが、失笑ものの仕様ですぐに廃れる。
ExジョブのAFクエストが追加されるが、
ナイトクエではバグつきで、画面がフリーズした。
低レベルで死亡者が相次いだため、ケアルHateに調整が入る。
殴られたり、時間でHateが減衰する仕様が追加される。
バラードIIの微弱体、上位精霊魔法の強化なども行われる。
バザーに関税が導入され、ジュノの余りに多い寝バザが消えた。
サンドリアのミッションがリニューアルされる。
競売が重く、ロストも頻発していたので、出品枠が減少し
一度閲覧するのに30秒の時間がかかるようになった。
HNMであるキャシーとセルケトがこの時に追加され、
また未実装だったHNM素材のレシピもこの頃に導入されたが、
その後2年間もこの時の防具が最高クラスの性能を誇ってるのは、
インフレしてない証拠だと褒めていいのか…。

- Auto party has been introduced. Fun for a while, but soon faded.
- Artifact of EX jobs has been implemented, but the Pld AF quest had a bug that the screen froze when ever they accepted the quest.
- Due to enormous amount of deaths during the low levels from Cure hate, ajustments were implemented.
- Also added new hate reduction system when you got hit, and by time hate slowly decaying.
- Ballad2 being slightly nerfed, and high tier blm spells has been improved (how is not shown).
- In jeuno bazaar tax system has been implemented to reduce the bazaars in jeuno.
- Sandoria missions were renewed.
- AH became very unstable, lowered the amount of items you could put in the AH and also added a 30second delay per viewing. (lots and lots and looooots of disconnection in jeuno that was not funny)
- Serklet and Cassie has been added in this patch, new tradeskill has also been introduced using items dropped from these HNMs.

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Think they were in the neighborhood of 12 or 14 public servers at that time. Forget exactly how many they started with, but they had to add a handful of servers shortly after Windows version launched.