Retainer disappearing

So I've been up and down the Jeweler's Row in Ul'Dah like ten times now, and my retainer is just GONE. Not there. Kaput. She still says she's there via the retainer list, and there wasn't a problem with the wards between the time I put her in there and now, but she's disappeared.

Between that and the fact that even if she WAS where I left her, it could take me five minutes to find her since the NPCs load sooooo slooooowly, this market system is basically unserviceable. I mean, come on, there's not even any kind of notification when a sale is made! In a game world that includes "linkpearl" cell phones, why can't I chat up my retainer to see how business is going?!

I know a lot of people on these forums have (some really strange) ideas about why an auction house is a bad idea (and frankly I could not disagree any more), but as it stands the market and retainer system is horrible. Come on, Square Enix, MMORPGs are not exactly a new thing anymore and the player economy issue is one that has already been solved many times over. You don't have to reinvent the wheel here, and seeing as you apparently can't even make your haphazard "unique" solution even work correctly I'd suggest you seriously revamp the whole thing.

I think this has to do with the Recovery that they do. Ul'Dah market wards seem to crash, and for every server. Looks like time I'm writing this it's Selbina, which is my server. I find this very annoying as well, since they aren't there I'm not making gil. I set them up before I go to bed, then I go to work, only to find out it crashed and my retainers haven't been selling my items for 12 hours. I understand they are working to fix all this, and everyone uses Ul'Dah, but it's affecting the economy of the game, which would seem like a vital problem.


And I like the idea of it telling us what sold. Not only do I have to check all the items prices of things I want to sell and write them down( otherwise I forget the price running back my retainer); I can't remember what I had and how many for sell and what actually sold. And maybe let us adjust the price of things in the bazaar instead of removing and adding, seems trivial but a few seconds saved is a lifetime when using the retainers, think I spend more time selling/buying things then I do crafting/fighting.

I am not trying to sound silly here but did you make sure you had something for sale on your retainer? If you aren't selling anything they will disappear.

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Originally Posted by Gracious

I am not trying to sound silly here but did you make sure you had something for sale on your retainer? If you aren't selling anything they will disappear.

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Yes, my retainer's bazaar was full, and when I was forced to re-summon them they hadn't sold it.

Also as long as you are not using a stand, you can just summon it normally and you wouldn't even have to search for it in a crowded ward. If you are using a stand, perhaps the time remaining expired. The stands need to be renewed personally every 24 hours or will reset and your retainer will not be up.

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Originally Posted by Hotohori

Also as long as you are not using a stand, you can just summon it normally and you wouldn't even have to search for it in a crowded ward. If you are using a stand, perhaps the time remaining expired. The stands need to be renewed personally every 24 hours or will reset and your retainer will not be up.

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It wasn't in a stand, and doesn't resummoning mean you have to reset their whole bazaar? And even assuming that by some absolute MIRACLE the system didn't bug out as often as it does, what about the utter lack of communication between retainers and the player? Like I said, THIS IS BASICALLY A FANTASY GAME WITH CELL PHONES ALREADY. It seems twelve different kinds of stupid for me to "employ" a retainer without having any method of distant communication. When's the last time you had a job but didn't have to put down contact information on the application?

The whole system needs a vast reworking, and it's frankly pretty baffling the amount of people who are like "NO WE DON'T WANT AN AUCTION HOUSE, WE CAN ONLY HAVE FUN WITH THIS GAME IF THERE ARE ARTIFICIAL BARRIERS TO COMPETITIVE PRICING DUE TO AN UTTER LACK OF FUNCTIONALITY."

No, calling your retainer never resets the items in the bazaar. It functions the same as the bazaar system on your character, items stay posted until you manually remove them or until they sell. There should never be a reason why you can't find your retainer in the wards when you can simply call them to you.

I'm not quite sure what you are raging about in the rest of your post but perhaps you called your retainer out of the wards and simply forgot. If you did do this, the retainer would stay out of the wards until you put them back in where you would like them to be. The system also displays your retainers first before all other retainers in range in the wards so if it's up where it should be, it will be the first one you see. If you are having display issues you may want to lower your screen resolutions or turn shadows off because the wards displaying slowly is more of a technical issue with a large number of graphics to display.

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Originally Posted by Hotohori

No, calling your retainer never resets the items in the bazaar. It functions the same as the bazaar system on your character, items stay posted until you manually remove them or until they sell. There should never be a reason why you can't find your retainer in the wards when you can simply call them to you.

I'm not quite sure what you are raging about in the rest of your post but perhaps you called your retainer out of the wards and simply forgot. If you did do this, the retainer would stay out of the wards until you put them back in where you would like them to be. The system also displays your retainers first before all other retainers in range in the wards so if it's up where it should be, it will be the first one you see. If you are having display issues you may want to lower your screen resolutions or turn shadows off because the wards displaying slowly is more of a technical issue with a large number of graphics to display.

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Did you miss the part in my original post where I said that the retainer list still showed my retainer as being in the ward I was in? This was seriously a bug in the game (and it doesn't seem like an uncommon one), please stop acting like I don't know how the system works without actually reading my posts.

It still shows your retainer being in the ward you set it in when it crashes or goes down. The recovery system is supposed to replace your retainer in the ward again but after 2 patches saying that its fixed, it still hasn't been fixed. Its going to be like this until they come up with a real solution other than [Recovery] posts on the lodestone.

Yeah, I kinda figured it was a crashing issue but I honestly didn't see anything about my world (NA Figaro) going down in the status or updates forum. I probably just missed it, I guess. But the system as a whole is obviously pretty unstable.