Originally Posted by
ESAR
The sales history defines the price of an item.
Since there is a history this defines the going rate for an item. In FFXI for me this caused me to need to be close to 100 to make money off my craft. This is BS, I do not want this same problem in this game and neither do you. It's going to happen with an AH / sale history, it's a bad idea. This is why the developers decided upon an alternate solution, the market wards.
Market wards are like rolanberry fields. It's a way to sell items without paying that fee to put them up. This works well for all types of weapons.
The bad economics are not caused by not having an auction house, it's caused because people have no way of telling what other people desire, therefore everyone including yourself is convinced we need an auction house. It's because a sales history is how we decided which items to sell or farm or make. Sales histories caused that vital flaw in the economy though and we do not need it or want it.
Rather we have the tools to decipher what people want, they're just not using it the way they could be. Retainers have the ability to sell. Restricting this to just items in our possession however is not helping us communicate to others what we need. If they gave us the abilities to get our retainers to search for what we need, all our commerce (trading of goods) problems would be solved.
I for one will start farming materials so crafters don't need to, but how the hell am I supposed to tell what to farm?