Market Ward concept has failed

The market ward concept has failed and requires revision.

There isn't enough space on each row to accommodate everybody's retainers. This leads to monopolizing certain areas of the market as well as extreme disorganization within the market wards, because spots are so rare that people sell whatever they have when they find one.

What purpose do they serve, anymore, anyways? What's the point of perusing the markets when you can easily search for whatever you need and instantly find it? It's a system that combines the search functionality of an auction house with the manual labor of a market. It needs to be one or the other.

I came here to say the title of this thread.

I reinstalled the game recently, coming in after having quit soon after release. I made a new character and got him up to 14 in just a few hours. I was feeling pretty good about things. Then I decided "maybe I should go sell some of this stuff I've got so I can buy gear."

Then I got back to town, remembered I needed a retainer, got one, gave her my junk, and set off for the markets. Then I got there, searched through the main things I wanted to price, and tried to set her up in a market. Except I couldn't, presumably because the place was wall to wall NPCs already.

I completely forgot how horrible this was. It's a cute idea in theory, but trying to emulate the realism of a real market and having to go to vendor to vendor, and even with the search function having to go and find them, is nonsense.

Make a decent auction house, then tell everyone they've got two weeks to get their junk out of the market before it all vanishes into the abyss. This market idea needs to be purged with fire. Even the AH in FFXI, as horrible as that was (hello mystery prices and 7 item caps!), was less miserable that this mess.

Yup i agree with everything you guys said, i dont' get it how there are people that defend that the market is a good idea, i find myself having to write down the name of 10 items i want to sell and their respective categories because i have to go search for them 1 by 1 to check their price then write down their prices next to the name so i dont forget and then go back to summon my retainer, if there is any space left... then finaly set the the baazar up and leave, not to mention the process of buying for example a full set of gear u have to look for every piece of gear and jump from ward to ward trought a barrage of loading screens till ur actualy done with shooping, it's ridiculous

The market ward was doomed to fail since the first day we started using it.

So I quit this game about 4 months ago because I was tired of the disaster they call the Market Wards. I don't give a rats a$$ who thinks that the wards are a good idea! They are TERRIBLE. It takes you, at least, 4 times as long to look for an item you could easily walk up to an AH window and search for in 30 seconds. I beta tested this game last summer and I truely WANT it to succeed, but without a consolidated way of gathering resources/weapons/armor/ect. in a time sensitive way, there is no way I am coming back. I heard that they were dropping the fatigue system, which is also a step in the right direction. I'm still not sure where SE gets off thinking that they have the right to dictate my play time and/or halting my progress in the first place for a game they hope that I will pay for. I played FFXI for 3 1/2 years and I was hoping that they would take the best of that game and up the ante a bit to this one. Bad news it appears, because TERA comes out in September and your chances of winning some of your loyal crowd back will die when it does. I can deal with questing bugs, glitches, and everything else if finding/selling items doesn't seem like such a timesink that I cannot quest. Good luck!

I'm honestly relieved to not see anyone defending this system. Before the search feature went in, the wards were almost a game-breaking failure. Now they've been mitigated to an annoyance. But still, why do they exist? The very feature that improved them also proved how pointless they are. I'm searching through an auction house-like system anyway to find the item I want, it's organized by price, so I'm obviously going to buy the cheapest one.. why am I marking the retainers, transporting to the ward, finding the NPC, and buying it from them? It would be comically absurd if it wasn't so dreadfully stupid.

Retainers are great storage. They are atrocious zombie merchants. An AH would fix a lot of issues.

you are not alone, i stopped playing in the first month of the release when i came back 2 days ago i noticed how the game changed to the better (no more menu lag) i played a little when i noticed my bag was full i went to the market but when i saw how time consuming it will be just to sell my items i just simply logged out...

while i appreciate the developer team for trying to be innovative, they should let go of this idea, some things even if it is old but proved to be effective do not need to be replaced, they should bring the AH back and leave the retainers to be used in small towns or villages in the game.

Personally, I have never been overly annoyed by the Market Ward system in general. People placing their stuff in the wrong place, now that annoyed me until the search came in. Yes, it was bad initially, but it has greatly improved. The market ward system didn't fail. The failure was in the players' grasping of the concept, or blatant refusal to try.

Is the Market Ward system a perfect solution? No. Is it so terrible that the only solution is to replace it with an Auction House? Also no.

People like to spew the adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The fact is, innovation is choked out with that mentality. I'm not saying the Market Wards are innovative, only that we shouldn't be afraid to try out new concepts simply because the old way worked just fine.

I'm using the market ward and selling stuff. Soooooooooo

The market wards are pretty useless. they really should just add a ah already and save time.