Any word on when we will get an Auction House?

Auction House please

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Originally Posted by AreeyaJaidee

No auction House. The Market Wards do everything plus keep players from being lazy. Why would SE put all that work into revising Market Wards repeatedly to make it function better and then give us a AH?

Face the music: Retainers exist. Market Wards exist. They both work. That's all we need.

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See sig. Wards do exist - as a fundamentally basic Auction House. :) Retainers could be accessed in numerous other ways, there's no reason to keep them tied to a dead concept.

Noone here has mentioned what the wards would look like if the games population wasn't super micro. Put up 4-5k+ people on your server, not the 400-1200 it has now, and then consider whether a market wards server better than an auction house.

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Auction House please

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Market ward,..etc are the AH's. Have you been playing the game? The search feature is practically perfect now. Like everyone has stated you just have to go to npc to buy your item.

..ps SE you should add some background voices to the wards..etc, you know like when you go to a crowed mall and you can hear voices but you can't pick up a distinct person, because the mall is just full of everyone talking. Not sure if you get what I'm saying, but that would add a certain ambiance to the various markets.

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Originally Posted by Aldwin

Noone here has mentioned what the wards would look like if the games population wasn't super micro. Put up 4-5k+ people on your server, not the 400-1200 it has now, and then consider whether a market wards server better than an auction house.

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That is a good point, it would seem very cluttered and kinda ugly if so many npc's were in the markets like that, plus times it by 2 npc's and that's like 8-10k nps trying to fit in the wards. This scenario I would welcome the old AH system, because I just wouldn't want to walk through all those people

Neverrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Please, let the answer be never.

People who want an auction house just want their items/gear right away...but the reason that's an issue has nothing to do with the wards and won't be improved by an auction house.

The wards work great now. All I want is for them to be less buggy so my retainers don't disappear an hour after I log off and I find nothing I put up was sold when I come back; bad for me and bad for players who wanted to get the gear.

Lack of instant item availability (at market) is just low player volume.

And yet you can still get anything you want if you ask people. You'd probably get a much better deal that way too.

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Originally Posted by ShinChuck

I'm not even sure what your point is, honestly. The people who are asking for an AH don't want a literal AH with nothing else sufficing ever.

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Who are you to talk for them? I can assure you that there are those who want AH system called Auction House separate from the Marketplace and can not grasp the fact that Marketplace is about to be made into one. As well as those who say "they don't want an AH since there is the marketplace" who mean that they want the marketplace improved to be as efficient as AH.

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It's been shown multiple times that there's no reason they must be kept together, and anymore are really *unnecessarily* connected. Retainers buying and selling is a concept for the old bazaar-style wards. It is now an outdated relic that only adds *unnecessary work* to the system. That's why they should change it.

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Well, if we take that approach then there is no reason why SE can't make this game free forever while updating it regularly for years to come and implementing an expansions worth of content every few months. Except the fact that it costs too much money, it uses all of their resources and manpower and is not financially viable tactic for a company looking to make profit.

Anything is possible as long as we ignore the 'details' above. They can improve the item search but they can also keep the retainers to function as-is. There is no logical reason to take it away from them, it just means more work for no apparent gain.

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Originally Posted by Rustyhagun

Market ward,..etc are the AH's. Have you been playing the game? The search feature is practically perfect now. Like everyone has stated you just have to go to npc to buy your item.

..ps SE you should add some background voices to the wards..etc, you know like when you go to a crowed mall and you can hear voices but you can't pick up a distinct person, because the mall is just full of everyone talking. Not sure if you get what I'm saying, but that would add a certain ambiance to the various markets.

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1) They are not perfect. The wards constantly crash, theres no pricing history, so prices on items are all over the place, and there is no way to tell if the item is NQ or HQ. This leads to jumping around all the zones where these items are spread out looking for said items. Its a stupid hassle that no sane person wants to put up with.

2) Yes, lets add more dumb features to an already dumb feature to increase the server loads so the wards can crash even more often.

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Originally Posted by Betelgeuzah

Who are you to talk for them? I can assure you that there are those who want AH system called Auction House separate from the Marketplace and can not grasp the fact that Marketplace is about to be made into one. As well as those who say "they don't want an AH since there is the marketplace" who mean that they want the marketplace improved to be as efficient as AH.

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Most people aren't so unreasonable that they won't use an auction house called "Market Wards" because it's not called "Auction House." Don't you think it's a little absurd saying people wouldn't accept "Wards" that offered everything AHs do but weren't called "Auction Houses"? A rose is a rose by any other name.

Of course they'd be happy if they got everything they wanted from the system, call it an AH or call it the Wards.

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Well, if we take that approach then there is no reason why SE can't make this game free forever while updating it regularly for years to come and implementing an expansions worth of content every few months. Except the fact that it costs too much money, it uses all of their resources and manpower and is not financially viable tactic for a company looking to make profit.

Anything is possible as long as we ignore the 'details' above. They can improve the item search but they can also keep the retainers to function as-is. There is no logical reason to take it away from them, it just means more work for no apparent gain.

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Er, you're saying cutting Retainers from the Wards would not be feasible financially or in terms of manpower? That big, massive SE and it's brilliant minds couldn't figure out a way to do that? Okay, I'd like to see your financial numbers, and would like to know the name of the dev team member who has told you this.

There's an entirely logical reason to take them away: they're an unnecessary, unintuitive aspect. The Retainers right now are extra work for everyone involved, it's extra maintenance, it would make the game flow better. It would not be hard to move them to another area, and allow people to summon them for banking aspects. Do you really think SE can create gorgeous, ingenious games, but not simply move the locations where NPCs are allowed to be summoned?

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Most people aren't so unreasonable that they won't use an auction house called "Market Wards" because it's not called "Auction House." Don't you think it's a little absurd saying people wouldn't accept "Wards" that offered everything AHs do but weren't called "Auction Houses"?

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That's not really the problem.. The problem is that people don't realize that what they are asking for already exists in-game for the most part. They are giving the devs mixed messages and as can be seen from the letter of the producer already, they seem to think an "AH" called Auction House is needed because people don't grasp that the concept already exists in the game. It is not good for this game that the devs are made to do unnecessary work.

Of course they'll be happy with the end result, but it doesn't help that they don't know it themselves before the end result becomes a reality. Before that they keep thinking AH is an AH and Marketplace is a Marketplace.

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Er, you're saying cutting Retainers from the Wards would not be feasible financially or in terms of manpower?

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Yes. I'm not saying SE can't do it, of course they can, but they have a limit like any other company in existence. Using valuable resources for a task that doesn't help the game would be bad for this game and thus not feasible financially. Even if they are sitting on a pile of gold, that doesn't mean it is financially or practically feasible to use it all on this game, for features that do not give sufficient return for the investment. It always comes down to "SE can do everything because they're so massive company", but believe me, every company has a limit, and we should not test what SE's limit is by asking for these kind of 'improvements'.

"Do you have he power to do anything?" The answer would be most likely yes. "Do you have power to do everything?" As long as the resources are finite (and they certainly are), the answer is no.

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There's an entirely logical reason to take them away: they're an unnecessary, unintuitive aspect.

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If they're unnecessary, they won't be used. Why is that a good reason to take it away? What does it improve?

Let's say for example the Expeditionary force content in XI. It was a useless feature that no one ever did, but why would they have taken it away? What's the logic in that? It's not detrimental to the game, it's just there. Does it annoy you or something?

There is no reason to take anything away from this game as long as it's not detrimental to it. That is a waste of resources in the best sense of the word.

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Originally Posted by ShinChuck

The "Wards" are a basic Auction House. You open a menu, search, find the lowest price, and buy, just with some random walking added in. The *concept* of "Market Wards" was a bazaar-style marketplace of random searching. That concept died the moment search was implemented. Call it Wards, call it an AH, "A rose is a rose by any other name."

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The concept of random searching died, but the bazaar-style marketplace is still the same. I can search for something but still come across something I didn't search for that I want to buy in that person's retainer. Also I rather just buy my item than bid over it.

If they scrapped the Market Wards and retainers, maybe they would bring back moogles to hold your stuff instead? ^^ "~Kupo"
If they keep the current Market Ward system of course there are improvements that they need to make (e.g. differentiating between +1, +2 and +3 items to name just one of many), which I'm sure they are thinking of and working on anyway. It is a work-around system for now, but as long as we end up with an easy way to search for and buy equipment/items I don't really mind whether it is a static Auction House or the Market Wards.

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Originally Posted by Betelgeuzah

That's not really the problem.. The problem is that people don't realize that what they are asking for already exists in-game for the most part. They are giving the devs mixed messages and as can be seen from the letter of the producer already, they seem to think an "AH" called Auction House is needed because people don't grasp that the concept already exists in the game. It is not good for this game that the devs are made to do unnecessary work.

Of course they'll be happy with the end result, but it doesn't help that they don't know it themselves before the end result becomes a reality. Before that they keep thinking AH is an AH and Marketplace is a Marketplace.

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I think you're just not giving people enough credit on both sides. The players are smart, so are the dev team. They know the score and what's being said. The dev team isn't so stupid to think that a Marketplace that acts as an AH, just isn't called one, won't be good enough for people, and people similarly would be happy given all the standard options asked for.

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Originally Posted by Betelgeuzah

Yes. I'm not saying SE can't do it, of course they can, but they have a limit like any other company in existence. Using valuable resources for a task that doesn't help the game would be bad for this game and thus not feasible financially. Even if they are sitting on a pile of gold, that doesn't mean it is financially or practically feasible to use it all on this game, for features that do not give sufficient return for the investment. It always comes down to "SE can do everything because they're so massive company", but believe me, every company has a limit, and we should not test what SE's limit is by asking for these kind of 'improvements'.

"Do you have he power to do anything?" The answer would be most likely yes. "Do you have power to do everything?" As long as the resources are finite (and they certainly are), the answer is no.

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I'm sorry, I just don't believe it would be some crazy financial drain, nor do I think that's a reasonable line of thought. I've seen smaller companies make bigger changes without a problem, and removing Retainers from the equation is a relatively small issue.

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If they're unnecessary, they won't be used. Why is that a good reason to take it away? What does it improve?

Let's say for example the Expeditionary force content in XI. It was a useless feature that no one ever did, but why would they have taken it away? What's the logic in that? It's not detrimental to the game, it's just there. Does it annoy you or something?

There is no reason to take anything away from this game as long as it's not detrimental to it. That is a waste of resources in the best sense of the word.

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But it is unarguably detrimental to it, and that's the point. Unlike Expeditionary force content, which I could avoid and still function in-game, Retainers are an unavoidable - and entirely unintuitive, unnecessary - aspect of buying and selling. The process could be accomplished without them.

As for benefits, numerous ones have been mentioned. It would be quicker buying and selling, it would reduce server load, particularly if population went back up, it would be easier to manage sales, it would be a lot less time consuming, it would be less longterm maintenance SE would need to focus on, they wouldn't crash and kill sales, they wouldn't be yet another bloated menu system to deal with, it would make inventory management more streamlined, no more having to stop selling to summon a retainer to manage stuff.

I'm not sure why you keep saying there are no benefits, when many people have posted potential gains - none of which you have argued, even.

Simply relegating Retainers to act as mules would have numerous benefits to the banking, economic, server, inventory and other issues, and it really shouldn't be particularly hard to do.

I'm also in the camp of the ones that think that, with the current implementation (and future evolutions) of the market wards an AH would just be redundant.

What we need is stable servers for the market ward and a centralized search system. With that the market wards would have every single feature of an AH, with windows shopping and a better opportunity for impulse purchases added.

The development resources need to be spent more effectively, IMHO, than in implementing a redundant system just because some people think that since a system works well in some MMORPGs, EVERY MMORPG should implement the same system without variations.

I dont think we need one, add in "History" and all is good. Some kind of global search be nice so you can view retainers from other cities.

But we have a basic AH, and nobody is asking for a redundant system. Really, if the Ward Auction House was upgraded to offer the same benefits of any other AH, people would be fine with them. People asking for an AH are not asking for a literal second redundant system, they are asking for equivalent functionality, whether from a new system that replaces the Wards entirely or a WAH that is adjusted to be as smooth as any other AH.

It doesn't matter if we want or don't want an AH, we have a very simple, unintuitive one - we're just asking to improve it to meet the reasonable standards of an AH.

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Originally Posted by viion

I dont think we need one, add in "History" and all is good. Some kind of global search be nice so you can view retainers from other cities.

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It would be awesome to have history in place of current prices, stops the gay undercutting game. The best thign about the XI AH system is that undercutting really didn't happen. Also made it easier to control a certain items(s) on the AH.

There is already a building in Limsa Lominsa assigned to be an auction house. It still isn't open though, but you can see from the insignia on the door that it will be an auction house. If you want to see it, it is near the docks in Limsa Lominsa. I stumbled upon it yesterday.

I still don't see people considering what the market wards would be like if more than the mere few hundred at most people were playing on your server. If this game was poplular, which is the goal of course, how would it look zoning into the battlecraft wards with 10,000 retainers in that tiny zone, waiting for the marked retainer to actually show up on your screen, and then trying to target him among the 10,000 surrounding him. I don't believe the market system could, or was ever designed, to support a large playerbase.

Personally I want an auction house. If se wants to try something different, maybe try making an auction house that is not only linked to all cities, but across all servers as well.

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Originally Posted by Gath

It would be awesome to have history in place of current prices, stops the gay undercutting game. The best thign about the XI AH system is that undercutting really didn't happen. Also made it easier to control a certain items(s) on the AH.

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Yeh undercutting is a bitch, for people with not a lot of money they love it, and when you see a bargin its like wooo, but then you try to sell things to make money you're like ".... okay WTF"

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Originally Posted by Aldwin

I still don't see people considering what the market wards would be like if more than the mere few hundred at most people were playing on your server. If this game was poplular, which is the goal of course, how would it look zoning into the battlecraft wards with 10,000 retainers in that tiny zone, waiting for the marked retainer to actually show up on your screen, and then trying to target him among the 10,000 surrounding him. I don't believe the market system could, or was ever designed, to support a large playerbase.

Personally I want an auction house. If se wants to try something different, maybe try making an auction house that is not only linked to all cities, but across all servers as well.

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Oh I like cross-server ideas like this. To balance it, it should probably have a huge fee to put anything on there. However, for someone trying to sell an item that has just no market at all on his server, or for very rare items, this could work. This would be a good way to avoid the situation you sometimes ran into in XI where an item sells briskly on one server but not have sold at all on other servers for various reasons(Corselet, I'm looking at you...)

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Originally Posted by Aldwin

I still don't see people considering what the market wards would be like if more than the mere few hundred at most people were playing on your server. If this game was poplular, which is the goal of course, how would it look zoning into the battlecraft wards with 10,000 retainers in that tiny zone, waiting for the marked retainer to actually show up on your screen, and then trying to target him among the 10,000 surrounding him. I don't believe the market system could, or was ever designed, to support a large playerbase.

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You have a very good point there. And since the Wards are already mimicking AH functionality, I think the next step is to eliminate Retainers, being a relic of the original, dead Wards concept, and reserve them for banking/mule purposes. I just don't quite understand this burning desire to keep Retainers as the means of buying/selling when everything else has gone AH-style, and they do nothing but add extra work to the process.

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Originally Posted by ShinChuck

I think you're just not giving people enough credit on both sides. The players are smart, so are the dev team. They know the score and what's being said. The dev team isn't so stupid to think that a Marketplace that acts as an AH, just isn't called one, won't be good enough for people, and people similarly would be happy given all the standard options asked for.

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Yet an AH is coming...

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I'm sorry, I just don't believe it would be some crazy financial drain, nor do I think that's a reasonable line of thought. I've seen smaller companies make bigger changes without a problem, and removing Retainers from the equation is a relatively small issue.

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It doesn't matter whether it's expensive or not, it is useless and that is what matters. It also matters what is given up in exchange for implementing this change (features that are actually useful to the game?). There has to be an exchange as long as they can not do everything they need to do. And this game has enough work for that requirement to be fulfilled.

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But it is unarguably detrimental to it, and that's the point. Unlike Expeditionary force content, which I could avoid and still function in-game, Retainers are an unavoidable - and entirely unintuitive, unnecessary - aspect of buying and selling. The process could be accomplished without them.

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Why is that? I'm not against making us able to buy and sell items from the search screen. I'm against removing that (and any other) feature from the Retainers. They wouldn't be useless, because in the end you could put up and look for items while browsing your mule. You could also go to the search screen and be able to do the same functions there.

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Originally Posted by Peregrine

You can do a lot of damage to an economy with single-point instant procurement methods.

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Not if all the important pieces of gear are Rare/EX, you can't! :P

There is already a building in Limsa Lominsa assigned to be auction house. There is an insignia on the door which shows it. If you want to see it, it is down by where you board the ship. It isn't open tough.

I would prefer a cross-city search feature, but still when ishgard will be open, it'll istantly become the new jeuno (alias, the trading center of game) so we'll just need bigger market wards XD. And in FFXI too the ah but jeuno aren't connected

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Originally Posted by Lebannen

There is already a building in Limsa Lominsa assigned to be auction house. There is an insignia on the door which shows it. If you want to see it, it is down by where you board the ship. It isn't open tough.

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Actually if you speak to the NPC near the door there, it says something that have to do with Court where people be judge for their crimes and stuff.

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Originally Posted by yukikaze_yanagi

I would prefer a cross-city search feature, but still when ishgard will be open, it'll istantly become the new jeuno (alias, the trading center of game) so we'll just need bigger market wards XD. And in FFXI too the ah but jeuno aren't connected

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Cross City search sounds like a great idea.

Personally i think the Market wards is a better idea then an AH, but just like alot of other things in FFXIV it needs to be fixed and polished up. History lists of prices (which would give players a better idea of the prices, which would make the game econamy much more stable than it is now, now its just plane chaos). list showing normal +1 +2 +3 items instead of all items apearing as normal. Better Search function. More items in the Bazzer. . Maybe even go as far as buying from the lists and receiving your items in some sort of a mail system(but like someone sed this would make the players abit lazy :P ). Most importantly Stop the crashing of markets :S .

The old FFXI-style AH was useful in that you didn't need to drop retainers in specific places to sell, and you could access what was being sold in all 3 cities from any of them.

I think the current Market Wards system with the search feature is good, and it probably wouldn't require (or perhaps I am just being optimistic and showing my programming ignorance) too much effort to link the search to the other cities. Perhaps an initial menu to choose which city you want to search (if they struggle to display all 3 together).

In terms of numbers of people, the AH's were ridiculously crowded. You had to reach the NPC to be able to initiate anything, which meant clustering round 1 of a number of points. At least with the Wards you just reach a "line" in the ground and the menu is triggered. I do agree that if numbers continue to increase on servers (assuming SE can even fix lag issues that still remain with the current population numbers!), trying to cram a lot of people into 1 place will cause a lot of trouble. Perhaps just as they have already done to "load balance", the outside search area for the Wards should be a separate server in its own right (if it hasn't already been done), to handle the heavy load it will likely have?

Regarding price histories, does it really matter? If you're paying attention to important items, you'll know approximately how much they're worth from looking around. You can see what everyone selling that item is pricing at the same time. It's your choice whether to buy at those prices or not. Knowing that things were cheaper/more expensive in the past is interesting, but not exactly important in the grand scheme of things. Yellow Gremlin (http://ffxiv.yg.com/) and FFXIV Pro (http://www.ffxivpro.com/) can give you info like that.

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Originally Posted by Arya

The old FFXI-style AH was useful in that you didn't need to drop retainers in specific places to sell, and you could access what was being sold in all 3 cities from any of them.

I think the current Market Wards system with the search feature is good, and it probably wouldn't require (or perhaps I am just being optimistic and showing my programming ignorance) too much effort to link the search to the other cities. Perhaps an initial menu to choose which city you want to search (if they struggle to display all 3 together).

In terms of numbers of people, the AH's were ridiculously crowded. You had to reach the NPC to be able to initiate anything, which meant clustering round 1 of a number of points. At least with the Wards you just reach a "line" in the ground and the menu is triggered. I do agree that if numbers continue to increase on servers (assuming SE can even fix lag issues that still remain with the current population numbers!), trying to cram a lot of people into 1 place will cause a lot of trouble. Perhaps just as they have already done to "load balance", the outside search area for the Wards should be a separate server in its own right (if it hasn't already been done), to handle the heavy load it will likely have?

Regarding price histories, does it really matter? If you're paying attention to important items, you'll know approximately how much they're worth from looking around. You can see what everyone selling that item is pricing at the same time. It's your choice whether to buy at those prices or not. Knowing that things were cheaper/more expensive in the past is interesting, but not exactly important in the grand scheme of things. Yellow Gremlin (http://ffxiv.yg.com/) and FFXIV Pro (http://www.ffxivpro.com/) can give you info like that.

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You incidentally mentioned a very important reason why price histories matter--we should not have to check third party sites just to know the market price for an item. In fact, the format those sites have make me think that they violate the ToS just by existing. Knowing the price history is not just relevant, but vital to the proper functioning of the economy. Without that, people can (and have) bought out all of a certain item and jacked up the price, and no one would be the wiser without the history.

The AH's being crowded would just be compounded in the Wards once the server population gets back up, because now you have to deal with legions of players AND NPCs. Even though search-marked retainers seem to get rendering priority, they can still take a while to load for me.

Really, trying to preserve this wards system would just delay what's necessary, which is to simplify this overly complicated system to make it easily usable and accessible.

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Originally Posted by Xeno

This. We really don't need an auction house now, and the state of the game is in, this definitely should not be SE's priority.

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How about the opposite, the ward is so much like the AH, why not take one more step, and take out the retainer system.

Then we can move them into a proper "moggle" house, and stop with the lag-a-ton from exchanging items to, running around the wards.

Really...AH = buy and sell
Retainers = move around a lot, with lots of unneeded tracking.

i thought we already have a Icon marker o_O why so hard to track a retainer down?

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Originally Posted by OJtheLIONKing

You incidentally mentioned a very important reason why price histories matter--we should not have to check third party sites just to know the market price for an item. In fact, the format those sites have make me think that they violate the ToS just by existing. Knowing the price history is not just relevant, but vital to the proper functioning of the economy. Without that, people can (and have) bought out all of a certain item and jacked up the price, and no one would be the wiser without the history.

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Agree with everything you said there.

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Originally Posted by Seirra_Lanzce

i thought we already have a Icon marker o_O why so hard to track a retainer down?

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It may not make a huge difference to people with awesome gaming rigs, but for those of us just barely meeting the required specs it takes a while to zone. Why should I have to select the item in search, then wait for zone, then wait for the retainers to load, then go to his menu and wait a bit for his menu to load, but woops he doesn't have the +1 I was looking for, wasted time.

That kind of rambled on but you get my point, just being able to buy it straight from the search menu saves a lot of wasted time that I could be using actually playing the game. The various issues with having retainers handle the items instead of a central ephemeral auction house have already been delved into, as well.

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Originally Posted by kukurumei

How about the opposite, the ward is so much like the AH, why not take one more step, and take out the retainer system.

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because the retainer system is an unique and enjoyable part of the game?

"since you're at it, why don't you scrap all your work and buy the code directly from Blizzard?"

Come on...

I do not want an auction house, an auction house only encourages speculation Money.

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Originally Posted by Lebannen

There is already a building in Limsa Lominsa assigned to be an auction house. It still isn't open though, but you can see from the insignia on the door that it will be an auction house. If you want to see it, it is near the docks in Limsa Lominsa. I stumbled upon it yesterday.

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Thats not an AH, its the "Judge" class :) (sorry had to say it)

Seriously with the current state of the market wards a auction house is not needed anymore.
In some situations it already better then one, for example you can sell hundreds of items seperately (i have like 300 pieces of cloth on my retainer for sale) which wouldnt be possible with an AH. You can also sell full stacks if thats what you want.
I dont understand all the people complaining about the SHORT walk to fetch the item, i mean comeon it doesnt even take 2 minutes, do you guys all have your fridge next to your couch that you loath walking so much?

Without reading the previous pages of this post I'll give my two pennies...

For me personally, an Auction House isn't just a simpler means of buying and selling, it's also the things that tie in and link with that sort of system, such as a delivery box system, and a storage system, ala Mog Houses.. For us to send, recieve, collect and store our items and wares. While yes, the retainer wards have seen dramatic improvements since the launch of the game, after 500 updates it will never be as efficient or as user friendly on the members or the UI as simply integrating an Auction House would be, not to mention it would also pad out a lot of that blank spacing around the City Nations that we see..

Why would people objectify the implementation of such an easy, smooth and useful system?

Albeit it not being top priority, smoothness and user friendliness of the UI and related systems are pretty high on the agenda, surely the buying/selling process falls into that category?

Edit:

Something I would also like to add is the unattractiveness of the Market Wards as current. Ward after ward of blocked up NPC's and a zone line on the outside that is crammed full of people standing blankly at the item search feature.

While yes, an Auction House imposes the same sort of limitations, (people standing at the counter), this is at least warranted as if you are transacting something between you and the Auction House itself.. Rather than staring blankly at what looks to be another pathway / alleyway leading deeper into Ul'dah itself.

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Originally Posted by Betelgeuzah

It doesn't matter whether it's expensive or not, it is useless and that is what matters. It also matters what is given up in exchange for implementing this change (features that are actually useful to the game?). There has to be an exchange as long as they can not do everything they need to do. And this game has enough work for that requirement to be fulfilled.

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So you've admitted Retainers could be useful even with an AH. You've admitted it'd wouldn't be necessarily expensive or hard to change. And you've yet to argue any one of the number one benefits myself and many others have listed to making that change, whereas myself and others have pointed out you could have ALL the benefits without losing a single useful feature.

Repeating "it's useless" without saying why all those benefits are useless does not make it true. Now, would you like to continue a serious debate? I'll gladly do so. But if you're going to simply repeat points, never use supporting evidence, and never deny any claims against you, then let's just move on. :)