Auction House.... Do we really need it?

Yes we still need an Auction House IF they keep the wards this small and separated.

It would be nice if the wards were 1 big open-zone with districts for categorization and you could just use the search feature and run over to the district without having to zone. That is the most annoying part of the Wards, the zoning.

Preferably a well lit room or outside. Come on SE!

Your complaint about under-cutting prices is called "Capitalism." It isn't a feature of an Auction House. It's just part of normal human nature. We want to get the most profit for the least amount of work. Add in supply and demand, and you'll get a person who wants to sell their goods quickly, so they'll sell them for just a little under what the competition is selling them for.

To be honest, the market ward system is a joke. The only difference from what we have now, and an "auction house" is if they added the option to just buy the piece from the item-search menu. That's it. If they did that, it would be an auction house. I don't get what is so important for us to navigate through a small, crowded room to get to some guy with a star over his head.

I know SE's intent was to make the game more "community driven." But fact of the matter is that the bazaar system only worked well because there was an auction house. They got the idea from the bazaar in Rolanberry Fields. Sure, it was a neat thing that occurred on a lot of FFXI servers. But you never see an archer running through all of them looking for arrows. It was something to do in our free time, like going window-shopping in a mall. If you know the item you're looking for, (as most shoppers do), go to the AH. If you're bored and want to see what some people are making, go hang out in the bazaar area for a while. The fact that SE wanted to force us to use the bazaar method would have been laughable, if I hadn't had to experience it first hand. Simply, it left us without an efficient means of trade.

Honestly, the only thing they need to do to "perfect the system" is let me buy it at the search-window, and maybe add a price-history function for when I want to sell something but have no idea what the going price for it is.

But for all intensive purposes, it's an Auction House already. I go to the counter, look for the item I want, and then I just have to go find the NPC that's holding it. I don't see why people complain they don't want an Auction House when we already have one. It's just making it about two minutes shorter of an experience. (Between warping in and out, and finding the jerk in a sea of NPCs that just stand there... doing nothing... Real immersive market place, I tell ya).

I would like to have an auction house.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Maxious

Even if SE put an AH in this game, it wouldn't keep players to undercut items to sale them fast. The market wards as it is now are facing the same thing..,, "UNDERCUTTING ITEMS".

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In a normal market, the only way prices go down is through undercutting. It would be ridiculous to force people to sell their hundreds of Marmot Pellets for 100k each because heaven forbid we should undercut the guy who wants to sell it for 100k. All you end up doing is rendering the Market Wards / Auction House useless as people will find other ways to get a proper deal.

(I was going to say Pelts, but Pellets seemed so much more funny :p )

IMO the wards have two severe cons that really don't help it in the long run.

The first is the limits of retainers at per ward, while they can expand it'd just make running to find the NPC selling your item(s) just that more annoying.

The second is the wards aren't universal, so to put it simply: Unless you're in Ul'Dah good luck finding anything.

The wards have certainly been improved a lot since their initial release. The search functionality made them much more usable. If additional functionality is added to allow sorting and filtering of items based on various conditions such as recommended / required class, level, etc then I think they could be kept.

Another option I think could work would be replacing all the retainers with stores setup around the stands in the market wards, with each stall selling a particular type of item. Players could sell their items to the stores for a set price, and other buy them for a set price. It would give SE more control over the buying and selling price of items to give more control over the economy, whether this is a good or bad point is debatable. The prices NPC would pay for the items could vary depending on current stock levels with NPCs refusing to buy them if stock levels become too high.

I think the "Wards" is working just fine, but as someone pointed out, it needs to have search option for High Quality items too.

And well, Auction House.... sure but i wouldnt want it to replace my retainers, i could live with having both.

Yes we do this was voted already, moving on.

Market wards will still be inferior to auction house until it's turned into one. Ah doesn't suffer from ward overcrowding, selling items in the wrong ward, zoning, retainer reset after crash, etc. market ward system is inherently inferior and not fixable

we need another AH like we need another thread about Ah's....

in case you missed the sardonic tone there.....

No.