Market Wards.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm new to the game -- I've been playing for all of a week, and my only exposure to FFXIV before this was its disastrous open beta. So, all things told, comparative to that, the game has much improved over all. I realize that Yoshi-P's focus at the moment is getting the core of the game stable and running properly, which is absolutely what he and his team should be doing. An MMO with crappy combat and classes is an MMO that no one in their right mind would pay for.

Having said that, the Market Wards as they current stand are a travesty. They attempt to be too many things at once, and end up being clunky and unintuitive (much like the rest of the game is or was). The search feature is unspecific and slow to update -- you only see that retainer selling Item X for 5000g, when they're selling Item X +2, and to make matters worse, Retainer Y that you spent five minutes hunting for sold Item X a minute before you started the search, whoops! The Market Wards themselves are a pain to navigate, with Ul'dah's being consistently overpopulated, and LL/Grid's being essentially deserted. Worse, many of the retainers there stay there due to vastly overpricing a trash item so they don't lose their place while others have to spend gil on stands that they have to renew with a lease, when there seems to be virtually no upside to stands, save for the obvious, "Use one of these when that MW is full."

What is it about a Market Ward* that is actually beneficial to the playerbase and in-game economy? Answer: there isn't. The reason you see Ul'dah so overcrowded, the reason you see people sitting their retainers in there for a 999 billion gil sweatshirt, is because the Market Ward, in its current incarnation, sucks. There is absolutely nothing that they provide that an Auction House system couldn't do and do better.

But if they insist on using Market Wards, they could try to add these things to help make them a little more user-friendly:

1. Every non-stand retainer gets kicked out after a maximum of 36 hours. No exceptions. Stands and stand owners now have purpose, and those with their 999 billion gil sweatshirts won't have much purpose in holding their spot, because the 36 hour timer would reset itself every time a retainer sells all of its goods and despawns of its own accord. (Ex: Billybobsmart has 10 items; 15 minutes before his retainer is set to hit the 36 hour mark and expire, someone buys up all of his goods. Billybobsmart will despawn, and the next time his owner comes to load him up with more to sell, regardless of the time elapsed between these two events, Billybobsmart will have another 36 hours to sell his wares.)
   
2. Differentiate item quality in the search menu. Win/win for the gatherers looking to sell, the crafters looking to buy, and the treasure hunters/MW players looking to make a profit.
   
3. Allow "off site" searching for outside cities; it can be made into a separate search function, or the distinction in which city Item X is would be added into the feature. Regardless, this could somewhat help alleviate a bit of the overcrowding in Ul'dah and give more incentive to park retainers in other cities.
   
4. Give stand owners an indication as to when their stand's lease is set to expire, or, possibly, allow leases to auto-renew if the stand owner has sufficient funds on them.
   
5. Reorganize the search functions so they make sense. Instead of listing everything by wards, list them by classes. All Discipline of War related weapons, armor, and accessories go in the "Discipline of War" selection, likewise for Disciplines of Magic, Land, and Hand. Any armor or clothing that has no specific function would be put into an all-purpose "Misc. Armor" category. All crafting materials would be in a separate tab, then further segregated into DoH specific needs -- Carpentry, Alchemy, Goldsmithing, Blacksmithing, Armory, etc. Potions, Food, and Crystals would be in their own categories.
   
6. Let players know which Wards are at full capacity. This would prevent a lot of headaches for players trying to squeeze their retainer in somewhere.

These are just some things that came to mind while fiddling with my baby Miqo'te. If they're dead set on not having a proper AH, at least things like this could greatly improve the functionality of the MW system.

* -- Note that I said "Market Ward", not retainer system, which I love dearly, being the packrat and travel hound that I am.

I posted my solutions to MW repeatedly on this forum.

All they have to do is stop rendering the retainers and have everything be done from a menu interface. It will make the wards infinitely more stable, scalable, and easier to organize and improve.

That would definitely help make things more efficient, certainly. I still think that numbers 2, 3, and 5 would be beneficial additions, all the same.

Please, no more!
Ah! Anyway, this' the topic: Clicky!

Scrap the MW already. I don't want to have to spend 10 minutes looking for one item when this could have took me 20 seconds with a decent market/AH/whatever-you-wanna-call-it interface.