Stop "fixing" the MW scrap it

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Originally Posted by Renshi

Nope. I'm just saying "That's an Auction House. Touch it with hands and see if you want it.", and I did it with the language most of the young and active people like to read because that makes them giggle =)

If you really want an Auction House, you want a Bidding system capable of a "Buy Now" function, remember that. If you still want it then keep this thread up and ask opening your heart for an Auction House to be implemented.
It doesn't give me heat or cold, because it'll always let me buy objects from the players.
It's just the fact of not trying to suggest to better a new system we already have and instead substitute it with an Auction House that pisses me off. Gives me the idea that you guys are too close-minded with this Auction House without thinking about how the Market Wards could be better and substitute the Auction House.

Try at least to fix something that has potential, instead of destroying it and replace with something that everybody has seen but functional. Who knows, you might be able to create another Buy-Sell standard!

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Dude, there is no fixing a car with square wheels. There is no compromise. You can't have a car with square-yet-slightly-rounded wheels. You need to put round wheels on it.

Honestly anyone who is against having an Auction House is a giant fanboy period............

Its friggen simple only blind cultist fanboys that would eat a turd made by SE would enjoy something that is so ass backwards as what they have now.

You people are hilarioussssssssssss

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Dude, there is no fixing a car with square wheels. There is no compromise. You can't have a car with square-yet-slightly-rounded wheels. You need to put round wheels on it.

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You are so wrong! :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwgvjTDgFxM

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Dude, there is no fixing a car with square wheels. There is no compromise. You can't have a car with square-yet-slightly-rounded wheels. You need to put round wheels on it.

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The fact is that there are no squared wheels, but wooden wheels with a motorbike engine. Just fix that and you'll have your new car, instead of a generic car you had for like 12+ years.

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Originally Posted by Renshi

The fact is that there are no squared wheels, but wooden wheels with a motorbike engine. Just fix that and you'll have your new car, instead of a generic car you had for like 12+ years.

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Ok, I'm pretty sure you're either too stubborn or too uneducated to understand my explanations of what a fundamental flaw is and why it can't be fixed. Optimizing the code will only do so much.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Ok, I'm pretty sure you're either too stubborn or too uneducated to understand my explanations of what a fundamental flaw is and why it can't be fixed. Optimizing the code will only do so much.

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When suggesting for a game put the coding aside, as it is something only the Dev team is going to worry about.
Not optimizing the code. Optimizing the concept.

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Originally Posted by Renshi

When suggesting for a game put the coding aside, as it is something only the Dev team is going to worry about.
Not optimizing the code. Optimizing the concept.

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Optimizing the concept IS getting rid of physical retainers. That's the design flaw that's causing the problems with MW. No amount of re-arranging retainers or coming up with new names or zones or organizational structures is going to fix it. Will you ever get this through your thick skull?

And to this day (I have heard this argument since release) I have never seen a compelling argument against AHs. It's ALWAYS either "It keepz da RMTz away" (it doesn't, as I've said a hundred times before, RMT will exist in ANY GAME THAT MAKES THEM A PROFIT), or it's "Do not like, Do not want, Moar wards plox", which is not an argument, it's an opinion.

There is NO GOOD REASON to not have an Auction House in the game. It's more convenient, easier to use, easier on the servers and is already tested and proven in a previous FF game. Doing away with the Auction House for a logistically inferior alternative in the name of uniqueness is the most ridiculous thing SE has done in this game.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Optimizing the concept IS getting rid of physical retainers. That's the design flaw that's causing the problems with MW. No amount of re-arranging retainers or coming up with new names or zones or organizational structures is going to fix it. Will you ever get this through your thick skull?

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So if they weren't physically there the concept would not be flawed. Why so?
As I can see it, it only takes player's position and bazaar content as a weightful thing to care about. Please help me getting that into my thick skull =)

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Originally Posted by Renshi

So if they weren't physically there the concept would not be flawed. Why so?
As I can see it, it only takes player's position and bazaar content as a weightful thing to care about. Please help me getting that into my thick skull =)

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MW servers right now have to handle all of this:

Player data (graphical information, actions used, position, and all player information)
Retainer data(graphical information, position, full inventory)
Zone data and zoning
Transactions

A MW server that only has to deal with text has to handle the following:

Retainer data (inventory only)
Transactions

The difference between the two is that the former has to transfer 10-100 times the data between itself and a client compared to the latter. Consequently, the former can only handle a few hundred concurrent users and retainers, while the latter can handle in the tens of thousands. The system is buckling under a few hundred users; there is no way this system is going to work when/if this game becomes more popular and servers start seeing populations in the thousands.

Adding more machines will increase the cost of maintenance, increase downtime and start up time in case of outage, and increase programming complexity because software gets more complex naturally the more machines that it needs to run on. These are scalability and stability issues.

Aside from performance issues, there are usability issues (like organization). The ward names are merely suggestions of where to place a retainer, and in no way enforce any kind of organization; they server almost no purpose. You cannot force retainers to sell only what items their current ward allow, because the vast majority of people sell multiple kinds of items and there are not enough retainers to go around (and if you increase the retainer limit, you run into the issues above with stability and scalability). SE's plan to kick out retainers based on arbitrary rules is mediocre at best. In the best case scenario, you kick out a retainer that has no items for sale and piss someone off because he/she lost their spot in the ward. Worst case scenario, you kick out a retainer that still has items for sale. This plan fails to address what happens when a ward becomes full and no retainer is with an empty inventory.

When you stop rendering the retainers, all organization will be done at the point of sale via the interface. Retainers become more like names for shops, similar to how Amazon.com has user-made shops, as does Neopets -- and they work well. Sellers simply dump their items in the shop (or to use FFXIV nomenclature, retainers) and open the shop (and possibly set up a shop message). Any sort of "browsing" that you think you might lose by removing physical retainers can be reconstructed using a menu interface (i.e. when you browse to the category "weaving goods", you are presented with a list of all shops that carry weaving goods).

An interface to buy directly from retainers in their current form would help usability and organization a lot, yes. But it does nothing to solve the issues of scalability and stability.

In summary: physical retainers present organization and hardware challenges, but everything they do now can be replicated in a menu interface.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

MW servers right now have to handle all of this:

Player data (graphical information, actions used, position, and all player information)
Retainer data(graphical information, position, full inventory)
Zone data and zoning
Transactions

A MW server that only has to deal with text has to handle the following:

Retainer data (inventory only)
Transactions

The difference between the two is that the former has to transfer 10-100 times the data between itself and a client compared to the latter. Consequently, the former can only handle a few hundred concurrent users and retainers, while the latter can handle in the tens of thousands. The system is buckling under a few hundred users; there is no way this system is going to work when/if this game becomes more popular and servers start seeing populations in the thousands.

Adding more machines will increase the cost of maintenance, increase downtime and start up time in case of outage, and increase programming complexity because software gets more complex naturally the more machines that it needs to run on. These are scalability and stability issues.

Aside from performance issues, there are usability issues (like organization). The ward names are merely suggestions of where to place a retainer, and in no way enforce any kind of organization; they server almost no purpose. You cannot force retainers to sell only what items their current ward allow, because the vast majority of people sell multiple kinds of items and there are not enough retainers to go around (and if you increase the retainer limit, you run into the issues above with stability and scalability). SE's plan to kick out retainers based on arbitrary rules is mediocre at best. In the best case scenario, you kick out a retainer that has no items for sale and piss someone off because he/she lost their spot in the ward. Worst case scenario, you kick out a retainer that still has items for sale. This plan fails to address what happens when a ward becomes full and no retainer is with an empty inventory.

When you stop rendering the retainers, all organization will be done at the point of sale via the interface. Retainers become more like names for shops, similar to how Amazon.com has user-made shops, as does Neopets -- and they work well. Sellers simply dump their items in the shop (or to use FFXIV nomenclature, retainers) and open the shop (and possibly set up a shop message). Any sort of "browsing" that you think you might lose by removing physical retainers can be reconstructed using a menu interface (i.e. when you browse to the category "weaving goods", you are presented with a list of all shops that carry weaving goods).

An interface to buy directly from retainers in their current form would help usability and organization a lot, yes. But it does nothing to solve the issues of scalability and stability.

In summary: physical retainers present organization and hardware challenges, but everything they do now can be replicated in a menu interface.

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So much truth in that post, thank you for your patience =)
I'd like to note that we don't have any idea on how the Dev team implemented this stuff or whatever. Now we just have to hear something from the Moderators or the new Letter of the Producer, where we'll see how they are going to handle this whole thing.

If you can hear us Yoshi-P, please put a note on the Marketing ingame system for the next Letter!

See ya! Time to craft some =D

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

MW servers right now have to handle all of this:

Player data (graphical information, actions used, position, and all player information)
Retainer data(graphical information, position, full inventory)
Zone data and zoning
Transactions

A MW server that only has to deal with text has to handle the following:

Retainer data (inventory only)
Transactions

The difference between the two is that the former has to transfer 10-100 times the data between itself and a client compared to the latter. Consequently, the former can only handle a few hundred concurrent users and retainers, while the latter can handle in the tens of thousands. The system is buckling under a few hundred users; there is no way this system is going to work when/if this game becomes more popular and servers start seeing populations in the thousands.

Adding more machines will increase the cost of maintenance, increase downtime and start up time in case of outage, and increase programming complexity because software gets more complex naturally the more machines that it needs to run on. These are scalability and stability issues.

Aside from performance issues, there are usability issues (like organization). The ward names are merely suggestions of where to place a retainer, and in no way enforce any kind of organization; they server almost no purpose. You cannot force retainers to sell only what items their current ward allow, because the vast majority of people sell multiple kinds of items and there are not enough retainers to go around (and if you increase the retainer limit, you run into the issues above with stability and scalability). SE's plan to kick out retainers based on arbitrary rules is mediocre at best. In the best case scenario, you kick out a retainer that has no items for sale and piss someone off because he/she lost their spot in the ward. Worst case scenario, you kick out a retainer that still has items for sale. This plan fails to address what happens when a ward becomes full and no retainer is with an empty inventory.

When you stop rendering the retainers, all organization will be done at the point of sale via the interface. Retainers become more like names for shops, similar to how Amazon.com has user-made shops, as does Neopets -- and they work well. Sellers simply dump their items in the shop (or to use FFXIV nomenclature, retainers) and open the shop (and possibly set up a shop message). Any sort of "browsing" that you think you might lose by removing physical retainers can be reconstructed using a menu interface (i.e. when you browse to the category "weaving goods", you are presented with a list of all shops that carry weaving goods).

An interface to buy directly from retainers in their current form would help usability and organization a lot, yes. But it does nothing to solve the issues of scalability and stability.

In summary: physical retainers present organization and hardware challenges, but everything they do now can be replicated in a menu interface.

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Let me preface this by saying I'm all for a buy it now interface, where no one has to enter the Market Wards to purchase an item. That along with better search functionality and a few other gems floating around in these threads and I would be quite happy with the end results.

There are lots of things that I agree to in this reply. But seen as the Market Wards look like they'll be with as a little longer, I still believe it would be beneficial if they were designed in a smarter manner, possibly by splitting the wards into more sections and capping how many retainers can appear in each section.

What does that save us? The server sends less data. (And the ONLY data it needs to send to each client is the retainer's name and character details of that section. Inventory and all other non-graphical data are unnecessary and only sent when asked for by a player.) Likewise it's only sending pertinent player graphical details to the client as well.

And maybe, we can avoid the Wards filling up.

Done right, each section of the Market Wards becomes not much more crowded than Camp Horizon or even the busiest part of Ul'dah, right in front of the repair NPC. That's assuming the problem with the server is it choking on sending too much data at once.

Even at this game's busiest, I've never seen Ul'dah crash, need to be reset or have as many problems as the Wards. And keeping tracking hundreds of players should be a lot more difficult and processor intensive than static retainers.

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Originally Posted by normalforce

Let me preface this by saying I'm all for a buy it now interface, where no one has to enter the Market Wards to purchase an item. That along with better search functionality and a few other gems floating around in these threads and I would be quite happy with the end results.

There are lots of things that I agree to in this reply. But seen as the Market Wards look like they'll be with as a little longer, I still believe it would be beneficial if they were designed in a smarter manner, possibly by splitting the wards into more sections and capping how many retainers can appear in each section.

What does that save us? The server sends less data. (And the ONLY data it needs to send to each client is the retainer's name and character details of that section. Inventory and all other non-graphical data are unnecessary and only sent when asked for by a player.) Likewise it's only sending pertinent player graphical details to the client as well.

And maybe, we can avoid the Wards filling up.

Done right, each section of the Market Wards becomes not much more crowded than Camp Horizon or even the busiest part of Ul'dah, right in front of the repair NPC. That's assuming the problem with the server is it choking on sending too much data at once.

Even at this game's busiest, I've never seen Ul'dah crash, need to be reset or have as many problems as the Wards. And keeping tracking hundreds of players should be a lot more difficult and processor intensive than static retainers.

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I already replied to this earlier and it does not make a difference.

The server is not trying to send all the data from every ward to a client. If you notice, only the retainers immediately next to your character are loaded, as well as those that are starred for searching. This is one of the ways they're curbing the amount of data processing needed on both the server's end and the client's end. Restructuring the zones so that you create empty space between the retainers provides the exact same result that the current method provides, while simultaneously making the wards even more tedious to go through.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

I already replied to this earlier and it does not make a difference.

The server is not trying to send all the data from every ward to a client. If you notice, only the retainers immediately next to your character are loaded, as well as those that are starred for searching. This is one of the ways they're curbing the amount of data processing needed on both the server's end and the client's end. Restructuring the zones so that you create empty space between the retainers provides the exact same result that the current method provides, while simultaneously making the wards even more tedious to go through.

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Never said the server was trying to send all the data from every ward to the client. That's silly, and I wouldn't code it that way.

It was somewhat implied. The server and client are already at the point where only the minimum amount of data is transferred. Adding more distance between retainers achieves the same thing.

Also for the record, ward servers don't handle only retainer information and transaction. Reread that post that you quoted: they have to handle players just like the rest of the world servers.

I was wondering if Yoshida had any idea on how to keep Market Wards and manage every player's retainers so the player can put them wherever he wants without problem.

Wouldn't that be pretty neat? No Wards problems!
Man I'd like to hear about it =D

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Originally Posted by Seif

Do you see an AH in the game? No? Then I don't know why you find it surprising that people still want one?
You know every time I log in to XIV I wish there was an AH every time I get an item drop I wish there was a system that made selling it more desirable option than tossing it and so on.

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setting up a quick retainer and setting stuff up to sell is not hard...if you trully just toss items instead of selling them, you fail.

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Originally Posted by Kailea_Nagisa

setting up a quick retainer and setting stuff up to sell is not hard...if you trully just toss items instead of selling them, you fail.

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I toss food type drops or just mass eat them while I walk around.

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Originally Posted by Joeking

I toss food type drops or just mass eat them while I walk around.

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well yeah, it is one thing to toss something you know you wont use/bother selling (just really low end bottom like stuff), but to toss something because you don't want to take the little time to setup a shop to sell said item, well then ;p

Frankly I don't even know what are the rare drops in this game because the system discourages selling. Without price histories all pricing is just guesswork.

When in the wards it's incredibly annoying to wait for the 3d models to load up. When the retainers finally arrive in the most unnatural way possible by just popping in front of you. You know that wait was so that you could "enjoy looking at 3d character models while shopping".

^that^ is the most stupid reason ever.

Also could people please stop bringing up RMT?
Seriously I haven't seen a MMO without RMT and RMT certainly doesn't ruin any of the games I've played.

XIV has all these systems set up to combat the RMT that make the experience horrible for us real players and still RMT is a massive percentage of my entire server population!

Is RMT active in XI? Absolutely it is. Does it impact the gameplay in any significant way? No it does not. It only has a meaningful impact on XIV where players are forced to suffer because of SE's crusade against RMT.

Copypasta from another thread:

Let me preface this by saying that I'm new to the game -- I've been playing for all of a week, and my only exposure to FFXIV before this was its disastrous open beta. So, all things told, comparative to that, the game has much improved over all. I realize that Yoshi-P's focus at the moment is getting the core of the game stable and running properly, which is absolutely what he and his team should be doing. An MMO with crappy combat and classes is an MMO that no one in their right mind would pay for.

Having said that, the Market Wards as they current stand are a travesty. They attempt to be too many things at once, and end up being clunky and unintuitive (much like the rest of the game is or was). The search feature is unspecific and slow to update -- you only see that retainer selling Item X for 5000g, when they're selling Item X +2, and to make matters worse, Retainer Y that you spent five minutes hunting for sold Item X a minute before you started the search, whoops! The Market Wards themselves are a pain to navigate, with Ul'dah's being consistently overpopulated, and LL/Grid's being essentially deserted. Worse, many of the retainers there stay there due to vastly overpricing a trash item so they don't lose their place while others have to spend gil on stands that they have to renew with a lease, when there seems to be virtually no upside to stands, save for the obvious, "Use one of these when that MW is full."

What is it about a Market Ward* that is actually beneficial to the playerbase and in-game economy? Answer: there isn't. The reason you see Ul'dah so overcrowded, the reason you see people sitting their retainers in there for a 999 billion gil sweatshirt, is because the Market Ward, in its current incarnation, sucks. There is absolutely nothing that they provide that an Auction House system couldn't do and do better.

But if they insist on using Market Wards, they could try to add these things to help make them a little more user-friendly:

1. Every non-stand retainer gets kicked out after a maximum of 36 hours. No exceptions. Stands and stand owners now have purpose, and those with their 999 billion gil sweatshirts won't have much purpose in holding their spot, because the 36 hour timer would reset itself every time a retainer sells all of its goods and despawns of its own accord. (Ex: Billybobsmart has 10 items; 15 minutes before his retainer is set to hit the 36 hour mark and expire, someone buys up all of his goods. Billybobsmart will despawn, and the next time his owner comes to load him up with more to sell, regardless of the time elapsed between these two events, Billybobsmart will have another 36 hours to sell his wares.)
   
2. Differentiate item quality in the search menu. Win/win for the gatherers looking to sell, the crafters looking to buy, and the treasure hunters/MW players looking to make a profit.
   
3. Allow "off site" searching for outside cities; it can be made into a separate search function, or the distinction in which city Item X is would be added into the feature. Regardless, this could somewhat help alleviate a bit of the overcrowding in Ul'dah and give more incentive to park retainers in other cities.
   
4. Give stand owners an indication as to when their stand's lease is set to expire, or, possibly, allow leases to auto-renew if the stand owner has sufficient funds on them.
   
5. Reorganize the search functions so they make sense. Instead of listing everything by wards, list them by classes. All Discipline of War related weapons, armor, and accessories go in the "Discipline of War" selection, likewise for Disciplines of Magic, Land, and Hand. Any armor or clothing that has no specific function would be put into an all-purpose "Misc. Armor" category. All crafting materials would be in a separate tab, then further segregated into DoH specific needs -- Carpentry, Alchemy, Goldsmithing, Blacksmithing, Armory, etc. Potions, Food, and Crystals would be in their own categories.
   
6. Let players know which Wards are at full capacity. This would prevent a lot of headaches for players trying to squeeze their retainer in somewhere.

These are just some things that came to mind while fiddling with my baby Miqo'te. If they're dead set on not having a proper AH, at least things like this could greatly improve the functionality of the MW system.

Or they could just get rid of the system and make it an AH.

* -- Note that I said "Market Ward", not retainer system, which I love dearly, being the packrat and travel hound that I am.

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Or they could just get rid of the system and make it an AH.

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Sure. But SE never was good with simple solutions.

Wards hitting capacity with almost no one playing the game.... sounds like inbound failure to me :/

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Originally Posted by Rinsui

Sure. But SE never was good with simple solutions.

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"Sometimes I wonder if the Dev team has a sign in their office that reads {Simple solutions} {No thanks.}"

And people say this game is nothing like XI. :rolleyes: