Market Wards, enough is enough

When you need to buy 8 different items for 1 recipe, how long does it take you?

Because it'd take me at least 15 minutes or so. Which is ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by Leeloo

So basically now we have Group A(thinks the market wards can still be greatly improved) vs Group B(MW are fubar, move on)? Hmm, I never minded the MW, I can find what I need quickly. Not sure what others are talking about when they say it takes an hour. But if they can't fix the crashing and improve in other areas the only solution left is to scrap it.

My confidence in them fixing it is dwindling.

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I'd be okay with SE leaving MW in and adding a separate, no NPC, window UI based system. Neither system would die, they would just complement each other.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

I'd be okay with SE leaving MW in and adding a separate, no NPC, window UI based system. Neither system would die, they would just complement each other.

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Yea I should've included that option in my previous post.

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When you need to buy 8 different items for 1 recipe, how long does it take you?

Because it'd take me at least 15 minutes or so. Which is ridiculous.

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And yea I can see that being annoying. One of many things in this game where you may not realize it during, but suddenly you notice it's been a few hours and you don't feel you've done a whole hell of a lot.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Barely-functional is indeed different from good. But no amount of refinement will make them good, because (for the millionth-and-one time) the design is fundamentally flawed. You can't fix that.

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I wish one of you would enlighten the rest of us with this fundamental flaw you are mentioning. A person not liking to zone to pick up their junk is not a fundamental flaw, it is a preference.

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Originally Posted by Wynn

I wish one of you would enlighten the rest of us with this fundamental flaw you are mentioning. A person not liking to zone to pick up their junk is not a fundamental flaw, it is a preference.

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Forced excessive zoning, penalties for selling multiple types of items, and hardware limitations and crashes are not features or preferences or whatever you want to call it. They're LIMITATIONS, because having to render every shop as an NPC is taxing on server and client hardware, and it's a bad design in terms of usability, organization, and intuitiveness.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Forced excessive zoning, penalties for selling multiple types of items, and hardware limitations and crashes are not features or preferences or whatever you want to call it. They're LIMITATIONS, because having to render every shop as an NPC is taxing on server and client hardware, and it's a bad design in terms of usability, organization, and intuitiveness.

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Besides the crashing, you are talking about preference, in this case yours. Preference does not a flaw make.

As far as the crashing go, servers crash. They need to fix how much the wards crash. However, that is hardly an argument to scrap it. The game servers crash too. I don't see anyone arguing to scrap the game because of it.

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Originally Posted by Dizmo

When you need to buy 8 different items for 1 recipe, how long does it take you?

Because it'd take me at least 15 minutes or so. Which is ridiculous.

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never understood why someone thinks that items in a game should just appear in thier inventory with no involvement or cost. Games mirror real things, there is nothing real where you have instant transmission of items upon buying them. While because it is a game they are going to lower or diminish real time things, Each player of the game decides what they think is enough. Some people would rather that you could teleport directly to every encounter in battle, other people think that traveling and having a world with monsters in it that you have to actually travel to is better. It depends on the person, nobody is intrinsicly right or wrong.

But imo, the market wards has more potential for growth and making merchanting an interesting mini game, whereas AH is the equivalent of making battle more text based. Essentially if you hate merchanting, then some version of AH is your answer, maybe with various controls to try to reduce exploitation, if you enjoy merchanting and immersion in the merchanting world then you probably would prefer some version of a Market system, maybe bigger or more extravangant, with specific things, but you want them to build on that system. Make no mistake though, the perfect instant item see every item created, and every item sold and every item cost AH can not coexist with the market wards, unless it has a heavy tax. So Id rather see the MW which has the potential of becoming a sprawling town with tons of items, shop advertising, shop building, management than an AH which has the potential of becoming a wall of text.

simply a matter of perspective

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Originally Posted by Wynn

I wish one of you would enlighten the rest of us with this fundamental flaw you are mentioning. A person not liking to zone to pick up their junk is not a fundamental flaw, it is a preference.

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They've been stated many many times already.

One of the biggest ones being that the servers and whatever process is running them can't handle all the NPCs in one area, despite the fact that hardly anyone plays this game. How are they supposed to remedy this when they release the PS3 version and expect the population to grow again?

Another flaw is just the fact that the NPC-based system doesn't grant any significant benefits over a purely menu-based system. It's just slower and prone to bugs due to server issues and game engine issues.

The fact that server congestion and game engine problems are even negatively contributing at all to the issue of economic transactions is a huge red flag. In what sane universe does our economic activity and marketplace get all screwed up because graphically, the game can't render enough NPCs at once?

The main engine of economic activity (market wards) is intimately tied to a whole host of other problems (graphics insufficiency, server congestion, server memory, NPC rendering, etc) that it shouldn't even be associated with in the first place. It needlessly relies on those systems to stay alive, and when any one of those things destabilizes, the whole thing comes crashing down.

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Originally Posted by Wynn

Besides the crashing, you are talking about preference, in this case yours. Preference does not a flaw make.

As far as the crashing go, servers crash. They need to fix how much the wards crash. However, that is hardly an argument to scrap it. The game servers crash too. I don't see anyone arguing to scrap the game because of it.

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No, sorry, you've been duped into thinking that these limitations are features of this system, and that they're optional or desirable.

Penalties for selling in the wrong ward were instated in order to coerce people to place their retainers in the right ward for organization purposes. if the shops didn't have to be rendered, there would be no need to organize them by ward, and there would be no need to penalize for selling in the wrong ward. Excessive zoning is another limitation, because servers and clients cannot handle so many NPCs and PCs in such a small area. Ward limits on the amount of retainers were created because of this.

There is no feasible solution for market wards. If server populations ever fill out to FFXI levels (4000 players), you can expect at least 8000 retainers. The amount of server infrastructure to handle that kind of load is ridiculous. If the server populations fill out even more, to levels of popular MMOs like WOW or Aion or RIFT, where you have 10000+ players per server, it's going to be a nightmare to work with market wards.

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Originally Posted by Rentahamster

They've been stated many many times already.

One of the biggest ones being that the servers and whatever process is running them can't handle all the NPCs in one area, despite the fact that hardly anyone plays this game. How are they supposed to remedy this when they release the PS3 version and expect the population to grow again?

Another flaw is just the fact that the NPC-based system doesn't grant any significant benefits over a purely menu-based system. It's just slower and prone to bugs due to server issues and game engine issues.

The fact that server congestion and game engine problems are even negatively contributing at all to the issue of economic transactions is a huge red flag. In what sane universe does our economic activity and marketplace get all screwed up because graphically, the game can't render enough NPCs at once?

The main engine of economic activity (market wards) is intimately tied to a whole host of other problems (graphics insufficiency, server congestion, server memory, NPC rendering, etc) that it shouldn't even be associated with in the first place. It needlessly relies on those systems to stay alive, and when any one of those things destabilizes, the whole thing comes crashing down.

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How do we know what is crashing the wards? How do we know it is the NPCs? Did SE tell us this? All I see in this thread is a lot of assumption and a lot of people yelling about what they want. This thread does not deliver on facts.