Centralized NPC Materials Vendor

I was mining in the wilderness surrounding Ul'dah the other day, and a thought occured to me:
what's really valuable, and what's for sale?

My inventory is full.
Not only full, but full of useless items that would take up valuable retainer space.

[SIZE="5"]The PROBLEM:[/SIZE]
You see, I don't want these items, and I don't want to invest the time and effort necessary to sell these items via retainer... The best solution for ME was to sell these gathered items to the NPC vendor once I made it back to town. Did it net me a small profit? Yes, but at the same time, I couldn't help but feel as though I was wasting these materials... and it dawned on me.

The problem is simple: it's too difficult / time consuming to sell crafting materials. Between moving the items from your inventory into your retainers' inventory, putting them in the correct ward and pricing out the materials, it's simply not worth the time - you'd be better off simply vendoring the mats and then spending that same time farming up another small pile!

But what can be done to remedy this?

[SIZE="5"]The SOLUTION:[/SIZE]
The answer can be found by looking to other games for inspiration. My personal favorite solution was found in the original Guild Wars many years ago - that is, each major city has an NPC which acts as a broker for crafting materials / goods. As a gatherer, you simply make a pit stop at this fellow on your way to the auction house (or market wards) and offload any small / inconsequential goods - saving up the more valuable items for the market wards.

But how are prices determined? Who gets to decide what the NPC vendor buys / sells the items for? The answer is: You do.

In Guild Wars, there was a baseline (or minimum) price which the vendor would offer you for an item. This was basically the price we're getting right now for vendoring items. If enough people sold items to the NPC vendor, the "supply" would increase, and the demand would go down driving the price to the baseline... however, if very FEW people were using that NPC vendor (or not selling a particular item very often) the demand would increase, and with it the value / price when buying or selling that item.

[SIZE="5"]The CONCLUSION:[/SIZE]
So why add in a system like this? Why not let us keep on selling valuable items on the wards (like we do now) and selling all of our less valuable / common items to the regular vendors (which I know at least I am doing currently)? Well, there are a couple of good reasons:

Convenience: How would you like a one-stop-shop for all of your crafting materials (for both buying and selling) that didn't require you to summon a retainer and set prices? Having used a similar system in another game, I can tell you that it was a fantastic system, and extremely convenient.

Availability: What's that? You say that you need item X, but it's not for sale on the Wards currently (or it's being sold at an outrageous price)? With a centralized materials NPC vendor, not only is this item available for you to purchase, but it's being sold to you at a very reasonable price.

Consolidation: Now all of your inventory space can be better spent storing weapons / gear / swimsuits / easter-egg-hats / whatever you really NEED to have ON you at a given time, rather than trying to hold onto that stack of banana-slug eggs until it ticks 99 and you can finally put that full stack up for sale.

In closing, I would hope that everyone would ask themselves the following:

Is there already a system in place to allow you to sell your items to a vendor? Yes.
Is there already a system in place to allow you to purchase crafting items from vendors? Yes.

...Then why ISN'T there a system in place which combines the two in a way which is both easy to use, and benefits the players in the ways described above?

[SIZE="5"]UPDATE:[/SIZE]

I wanted to clarify some of the benefits of this type of system which didn't really make it into the first draft...

The benefits to the playerbase are many:

1.) It encourages people to gather materials from all zones / level ranges, because as the market becomes saturated, the price the NPC vendor is offering goes down (towards the baseline) while at the same time rarer materials (those not found / sold often) would jump in price / value by comparison.

2.) It removes some of the unneccesary legwork involved in purchasing these materials. You can safely assume that if yellow ore is being sold for X at the NPC, you won't find it being sold for substantially less in the wards, as the seller could easily sell his goods to the NPC instead.

3.) It's a gil-sink. You can't beat the rake (or at least that's what I keep telling myself when gambling) ... the NPC buys for X-1 and sells for X+1, thereby removing some of the excess gil from the economy. The amounts of the over/under on items could be controlled by SE, allowing them to adjust the prices as necessary to balance out the economy of a given server.

Hate to burst your bubble, but you aren't the first to suggest this though yours is more detailed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tymora

Hate to burst your bubble, but you aren't the first to suggest this though yours is more detailed.

Great minds think alike?

I kid, but seriously I did a search (in this forum subtopic) for materials + crafting + vendor and didn't see any topics, so I thought I'd start one!

Similar topics:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...d-at-npc-store

Read a few others but can't remember where they are - Mostly in the Markets and Retainers forum.