MarketBoard Needs an Update

Hello,

I am a newer player, but i have played MMOs since i was a kid, starting with Runescape. I love FFXIV but the marketboard is very chaotic and makes a lot of the item prices on it very volatile. I've brought this issue up on Reddit in the past and it was met with toxicity and negative comments. A lot of the toxic FFXIV community tends to gravitate to Reddit I've noticed. But, anyway, I think the marketboard desperately needs to be updated and this is why.

1. Items take INSANELY long to sell, or at the very least, way longer than they should. If you compare FFXIV's community size to other games, FFXIV will either have more players OR a slightly lower amount. Runescape, WoW, New World, and even Tarkov (which isn't an MMO) All of these games have a trading system similar to the marketboard on FFXIV. The major difference is that on these games, items sell instantly or within 30 minutes 99.99% of the time.

Runescape used to not have a marketboard system, we would have to spam what we were selling in chat and wait for trades. They brought the Grand Exchange to the game and it made life so much easier. You would think the prices of items tanked and it messed up the delicate economy but NO It was one of the greatest things they did to the game. How their system works is, when you go to buy an item it will automatically show you a price super close to the average sell prices ACROSS ALL SERVERS. You can dump that price up a little bit if you want to buy the item instantly or wait for someone to sell it for the desired price you'd like to buy it for. When you go to sell, you'd do the same thing. You can lower it slightly and BAM it'll sell instantly EVERY SINGLE TIME.

2. Constant undercutting takes up WAY too much of everyone's time. You have to spend so much time undercutting everyone else on your server and still no one's item will sell. I could just undercut by a huge margin which is what a lot of people are forced to do. But this leads to items being underpriced and people losing out on potential gains.

3. The main issue is that every marketboard is shared when it comes to buying BUT you only see the price on YOUR server. This makes undercutting even worse. You want to sell an item, so you look it up on the marketboard to check to price. Say it's 350k, check the buy history. You see 350K 370K 378K and 7 others for 380K. So you think to yourself, okay, I'll put mine up for 349,999 gil. You wait hours and it doesn't sell. Hours turn to days and each hour you have to undercut the other guy and you're stuck there wondering why it isn't sold. -----

Well unbeknownst to you, there are multiple other servers selling it for 280k but you don't have knowledge of that because you're a somewhat new player. Or you're a player who DOESN'T download software against the the TOS or use websites that are highly inaccurate and don't show the current prices. So you're competing with prices that you have no knowledge of without spending hours visiting every single world on every data center. Even tho your server says people WERE buying it for a higher price. And even if you use websites,it still isn't a guarantee because the price is already dumping.

Not only that but because one person decides to undercut by 70k another person undercuts on a different server by 10k then another person by 30k then another by 50k until the prices completely drops because no one wants to wait or compete with prices that they can't even see in real-time. It could just be one person undercutting but no one KNOWS THAT. It just leads to a highly volatile market. This even happens with items that have a healthy market, Items that SHOULD sell for a certain amount. But that price can so easily be driven down by players who don't want to wait. Which is Normally fine, because if the demand is there, then the price will go back up. But everyone is connected and disconnected at the same time. 5 people on different servers could see that ONE guy selling for 70k lower then decide to do the same. They have no knowledge that it's just ONE person but now it's too late.Then more and more people follow suit and now the price is dumping

The marketboards being semi-universal is fine, but we need to see the prices of each server in real-time. It is INSANE to me that more people don't complain about this, i honestly think a lot of FFXIV players haven't played other MMOs to know that this IS NOT normal. And i noticed a lot of people just scream "Free Market" but don't understand what that actually means. What I'm suggesting is still a free market, it's just a BETTER market. Throughout history, when you buy and sell items or just even sell. You would always want to compete and know your competitor's prices, right? Now try selling at your stall with zero knowledge that someone across the street is selling for half as much. What do you do? Lower the prices, great. By how much? 25%? doesn't work, 30%? That didn't work either, now it's been 2 days of zero sales. You'd get desperate right? Okay let me lower it by 60% Now you got sales! Even tho they were selling just fine for the other guy who is now selling higher than you so what does he do? Undercut you! Now you undercut him! But you both don't know how much you're undercutting each other for because you STILL don't know your competitor's price so you keep throwing out random prices until something works. Now the price has fallen a ridiculous amount. This is not how it should work.(this is simulating undercutting on separate servers without knowing prices without visiting those servers JSYK)---

Look at WoW, we can see each item by each player just like FFXIV, what's the difference? Each server that has merged shares the same universal Auction House. Items on WoW Sell INSTANTLY 99% of the time. Even old items from when the game first came out that barely have any use. Why? Because we see who the competitors are which allows for the supply and demand to figure out the price organically. There is nothing organic about the FFXIV economy. It's volatile and a pain to sell almost anything on, I'm assuming the newer content is easier but this is still an issue.

I want a free market and would never ask for that to be changed. All I'm saying is that we deserve to see the ACTUAL price of each item, going by the tools that the game gives us does NOT cut it. Our server price is all we see, that price means NOTHING when selling. What matters is the prices from EACH server. And if you're going to sit there and demand i go to the 20+ other servers just to find the actual price of each item in 2023 then you need to do your own research on why that is too much to ask for.
So please allow us to get real-time prices.

You could fully merge all server marketboards, allowing us to see EVERY single item no matter what server is selling it. Which allows us to buy/sell from anyserver.
OR
Do what i said above and instead of each server/data center, you just combine all servers on that specific data center. I'm on Primal, so only Primal would share their marketboard.

There are other options idk.

We need this in the game DESPERATELY, i personally think it will make the game so much better. Now i don't even get excited when i get items because i know it's going to be such a PAIN to sell. I really hope someone from Square Enix sees this and at least let me know what you think of this and why you agree or disagree with it.

did i even post this on the correct thread

Thank you for taking the time to type up your full thoughts. Nice to see posts of substance on the forums sometimes. On my world I've struggled to sell much for the last few years. It's definitely gotten more difficult to translate time and effort into money.

One of the problems is there being massive amounts of new materials added each expansion, while the majority of old materials are not reused in current recipes to maintain demand and value. Items which have become worthless should be regularly given new uses and be needed in large amounts.

All crafted equipment has a very fleeting demand, especially leveling gear that people can just blow past the required level without ever using. Gear could be reused in multiple ways, such as in recipes to make new augmented versions, or required by NPCs in exchange for something else.

The marketboard could be upgraded in many ways. A 'new' tab showing all items from the current and previous patch. A top sellers tab. A demand tab showing the popular items on people's wishlists and favorites list. The ability to click on a retainer and see all other items listed by that person.