The Market Stall System

Do you find it horribly tedious to look through page after page of materials looking for the stuff you need to craft that new piece of armor at a reasonable price?

Do you have trouble finding anyone that will buy your wares and materials?

Do your retainers look like hopeless hikikomori because they never see the outside world?

Well do I have the solution for you!

The Market Stall System would implement a bustling market bazaar in the housing areas of the three main city states each bazaar would be populated by stalls that would be rented out to players for Gil on a subscription basis.Each stall would be fully customizable and could possibly be upgraded to full shops. The number of shops Players' can have would be limited to one per retainer who would be the manager of their own location. The player would choose prices for products and advertisement phrases that would be broadcast in the new /market chat; this would be available in the housing and city areas of the three main city states. Market boards could be repurposed to list the name and one sentence description of each store. When starting out, stock will be limited, but as you nurture your burgeoning enterprise you can go from a smelly miner selling dirty rocks to a smelly miner who owns a successful business!

I have to apologize to anyone who, unlikely as it is, might have read "Ultima Limit Break System" and got a little excited but I soon realized that is going to take about 16 posts of this length to fully do it justice, I'm going to get back to that when I have it fleshed out. If anybody has even a slight thought about this system or the inspiration system for gathering I want to hear from you! Thanks for reading!

you can edit your post to exceed the limit

Sounds like needless complexity that introduces more problems than it solves, all to implement a system that probably only appeals to RPers.

If you have trouble finding materials for crafting simply level your gathering skills. As to having stuff sell, make what's in demand, and it sells. Adding this market stall system would be pointless and just cause even more congestion in areas that are already overfull.

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Originally Posted by Zarabeth

If you have trouble finding materials for crafting simply level your gathering skills. As to having stuff sell, make what's in demand, and it sells. Adding this market stall system would be pointless and just cause even more congestion in areas that are already overfull.

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I'm never looking for gathered materials, usually ingots/rivets. The placement of these things could funnel people away from currently congested areas.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Sounds like needless complexity that introduces more problems than it solves, all to implement a system that probably only appeals to RPers.

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Could you detail problems this would make for you?

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Originally Posted by Arulas

Could you detail problems this would make for you?

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Because it's inferior in every way to the current market board and rather than just needing to be on the ball and cutthroat with that, I now would have to waste my life away advertising a stupid store like it's real life or something. I'd also lose the advantage of knowing exactly how all of the competition has priced their stuff. It would just make things annoying for anyone who actually wants to do business, as opposed to people who just want to RP owning a shop. Furthermore, it would generate a ton of spam in the area it's located in, as literally tens of thousands of players would have stores on some realms.

Ironically what the OP is asking for is exactly what FFXIV version 1.0 had, the Market Ward system which was a set of instanced areas in each city state where player retainers stood around running bazaars, and yes, just as he mentioned the player could rent out shop fronts for their retainers to make them more 'visible'. However, this did not work as well as it sounds.

In fact, the whole system was awful. It was impossible to find anything as you manually had to inspect every retainer individually, as there was no search function, and due to 1.0's terrible graphic engine (Crystal Tools) the whole area tended to be a laggy mess. A search function was belatedly added much later after Yoshi took over as producer, but the problems with the Market Ward still continued, to the point Yoshi just decided to streamline the whole thing into what we have in ARR, the Market Board.

Your retainers still inhabit the Market Ward, it's just no longer accessible by the player, instead you do all your transactions from the board without having to directly interact with them. And I am glad it is gone, the Market Board is just so much easier to deal with.

Being "on the ball" and cutthroat is infuriating and, most importantly, not fun. Also, to be clear you don't type advertisements manually; you tell your retainers what to yell on chat at regular intervals. I don't know how a RPer hurt you, but if you don't like annoying, convoluted, and fun role play things: please, don't ruin Eorzea like what I saw in Azeroth.

All I can think of is an area with a shit ton of ppl long loading screens wall of text in the chat box my screen filled with names and searching from stall to stall trying to find what I want then going around to price compare only to come back to the cheaper stall of find that the item I want is already gone.