Would anyone else not even blink if 2.0 launched and markets/retainers dissappeared?

I am fairly new to this game, but I am a long time veteran of FFXI since launch, and I have even played other MMOs since launch (WoW, for one)

I am familiar with auction houses and different types of MMO player economies. But I absolutely cannot stand the current system!

If I logged in after 2.0 to find that retainers were all fired (or preferably, killed) overnight, and instead the auction house from FFXI (even with its flaws) was implemented, I would jump for joy!

As it stands right now, I have not even bothered to sell anything because of the Ul'Dah wards being full and not wanting to take the time to rent stalls. I don't need my economy to be built on a weird, gimmicky system. Just allow players to easily buy and sell goods without jumping through hoops and navigating 4000 menus.

I usually blink on a daily basis regardless of what happens.

In any case, we already know the market system is going to see significant changes in 2.0, but I doubt we're going to get a copy/paste of FFXI's system.

"Auction house functionality" is planned for 2.0, whatever that means specifically. So this entire discussion may end up being irrelevant. The dev team has made mention of retainers in 2.0, though, but they've said that their uses will expand beyond what they're used for today.

To answer your specific question, in my opinion, retainers are a hugely clunky and frustrating part of the item-sales process as it stands today, so an auction house will help alleviate that stress. If retainers don't serve that purpose in 2.0, I'm sort of curious what purpose they'll end up having, aside from being a storage bin with a name and a face. If they're used in a way that's enjoyable to use and not convoluted like the current system/UI, then I suppose I wouldn't mind necessarily. It really depends on what they'll be used for, and how.

If I could go back in time and prevent retainers from ever being thought up, though, yes, I'd do so.

Long as I got someplace to hold my stuff.

FF11's AH system is fine, even if it's sort of a reverse-auction. Sellers are competing over having the cheapest goods instead of buyers competing over giving the highest price.

I would have preferred FF11's system copypasted directly into this game instead of the retainer/ward system, as long as we got more selling slots. However, FF11s system would be completely incompatible with how items work in FF14. In FF11, every AHable item is exactly like every other AHable item of the same name, which means the server doesn't need to keep track of every individual item, but instead just store a string like "x item, y amount". In FF14 however, every weapon can have several hundred possible configurations through the use of materia.

If you wanted to put such an item in FF11's AH, the AH would have to remove all the customisation of the item, and I'm sure we can all agree that that's a pretty bad idea.

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"Auction house functionality" is planned for 2.0, whatever that means specifically.

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I'm not sure where people are getting this.

We already have auction house functionality. It's a bit clunky because it was all tacked on after the fact, but it's there. any future ""Auction house functionality" is most likely just the ability to browse and buy without going to a special area to do it.

The markets now have textual item search, price history, buy directly from the item search, everything any other auction house has (except that all sales are buyouts, rather than timed auctions which I honestly don't care for- I want to pay money and get my item, not wait and fight with other people over it). It also has features other AHes don't have, like the ability to put up a request to buy items and to request repairs of items you have stored.

The only problems with the market as it is now are:
1)limited capacity - I guess this is supposed to get us to disperse or something but it's not working. every section in ul'dah is full most of the time.
2)Ease of access- it's inconvenient to have to move to a special area to trade. Adding an NPC to take you there helped but it's still a bit of a pain.
3)Listing an item takes too many steps. I like the feature to request items and repairs, so I don't want retainers to go away, but I should be abel to just click a 'sell' button in the UI and have the item automatically go to the retainer bazaar for sale.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

I'm not sure where people are getting this.

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The third PDF.

http://i.imgur.com/8FVDR.jpg

TBH, it makes no difference to me whether it's an actual AH or not. All that I care about is whether I can list items quickly and easily, without 8 steps involved. Buying stuff right now is OK, except for the fact that the three cities can't be linked yet; it's mostly the selling process that's tedious.