A central trading house and retainers together

It seems a lot of the arguments for or against an 'auction house' are based on convenience and time. I have an idea of how we could have both of them in a very good working system.

I was totally for an auction house when the game was released. Without the search function the market wards were a complete disaster. I honestly think that buying in ffxiv's marketplace is a lot more convenient now. I have not had trouble buying anything from the marketplace in a long time and honestly, if all I had to do was buy things I would be totally happy and loving the marketplace right now. It's like an auction house with 20 seconds of delay more or a bit more. It is different and perhaps a recycled idea but in a way refreshing and immersive. The only problem comes when you have to sell something or pick up your gil. Then it gets too complicated and bothersome to the point that I rather vendor or sometimes even just TOSS everything to save time. It takes too long to sell that I think some people can't be bothered and this is the biggest problem that I see with the marketplace.

The idea of the retainer selling your things does not have to be deleted or erased. It can still be that way. They can make it so that you can still have retainers but instead of all of them cramped in a dark damp zombie house they could populate the streets of Eorzea. They could be summoned anywhere in the world. in the camps, or the streets of UL'dah, Gridania or Lima Lominsa or outside in the wilderness.. but at the same time give them some idle animations etc. so they dont look like dead zombies crowding the world. They could add an auction house/broker/bidding house basically a "buy/sell/collect gil" interface. Then you can have both retainers selling things for you at popular gathering places like camps and cities or by NM's or instance dungeons, grinding locations etc while you have your central trading interface selling things and where you can buy things quicker and more conviniently!

This would give people the central trading/buying/selling/collecting gil interface they are looking for (where they can buy/sell and pick up gil all in just a few minutes and so encouraging the economy of the game as well) and at the same time you would still have a perfect use for your retainers who could seek items for you, sell or repair your gear even while you are out somewhere doing something else.

All of a sudden crafters would be much happier because there would be more materials in the 'central trading house' and buyers would be happy cause that would mean more things to buy and more gil to spend. And you would still have your retainers giving the empty lands of Eorzea more life. It would be like you can AFK bazaar all the time... but you don't have to be logged in for that and you don't have to be running your game or standing there afk. (this is what I imagined when I read about the game before the it's release.)

I also think price history is really unnessecary if something like a 'central trading house' would be added. I think at all times there would be enough of one item for everyone to get the best price for them or have a reference to know how much to sell it for. Also some materials could be cheaper or more expensive, easier or even more difficult to obtain today than tomorrow or next month. It's not fair for people to base there opinion of what an item is worth based on what someone else paid for it last week or last month. The prices should not be carved in stone but based on availability, supply and demand. That means it's alright for things to be cheap if there is too many of them for sale and a price history should be irrelevant. At the same time it's alright for things to be more expensive (if someone just went on a buying spree and bought all the dodo hides available for example, then they would cost more till the supply got high enough to drive the prices down again).

There should not be a problem of knowing what is a good price for most items as most of the time there will be should be some up (since it would be so convenient to sell buy or pick up your money) that everyone would almost always have a reference for prices. For the most rare items you have to agree that no price history is necessary or fair. If it is a rare item you pay for it if you think it is worth what the person is selling it for not weather its an affordable good fair price. If it is a rare item it means if you want it you buy it now for whatever it sells or you might have to wait another month for another opportunity to even have the chance to consider weather or not you want to pay XXX for the item.

I would not want the retainers crowding the streets of Eorzea. I have a hard enough time targeting individuals as it is on many an occasion. Also, you know how long it takes some people standing next to you to load at times? Imagine about fifty times the amount of people around Gogorano. Urgh. :(

The servers would not handle such an idea well, and nor would my targeting system.

EDIT: Searching for specific retainers would also be a nightmare. "There are two retainers with this item. They are in other regions, out in the middle of nowhere. Good luck!" There goes all the anima. :(

You would not need a search for retainers since you have a place to go to search for things. Besides, I don't think you have any clue what SE hardware is so please leave it to them to decide weather or not there hardware can handle it.

If your PC can't handle it, consider upgrading.

Otherwise try to be more constructive instead of setting limits based on what you think a major gaming companies hardware equipment can handle.

The hardware is, in it's current state, unable to display every retainer in quarter of a single ward in Ul'dah. It is nothing to do with my PC, which handles the game at high settings perfectly fine. I find the whole "you don't know what their hardware is" argument tiring, because while we don't know what hardware they have, we do know that they have had to scale things down because the hardware they have was struggling to load people who you were standing immediately next to in Ul'dah when you were in a busy area.

They openly discussed this over previous updates.

Isn't the MW crashing because of to many retainers??...I think Looney is right. Putting that much more into the main instance (not its own like it is) would not only be to much server side but client side to. I think they put retainers inside it's own instance for a reason. I couldn't imagine they spike in CPU/GPU for such a idea. The game already has pretty high requirements. Whats to stop people or a big bored LS from purposely summoning all retainers in one giving area crashing the server. They do have limits to how many characters can be rendered at a giving time in one area. (just like our computers) and I think they prioritize player characters over NPC/retainer characters in the main world. That is also why you have a boundary in which characters, textures etc. are rendered or seen from your camera position.

Retainers anywhere in the world?? Don't see any now...but I can see exploits from this idea. Like fighting NM's or boss battles...summon all your retainers and have a infinite supply of whatever you want. Have whatever you need always with you? Thats also like doubling your inventory space.

Maybe they can put a limit to prevent everyone from summoning all retainers in one spot. Maybe there can only be X many per map grid. That would solve that problem.

There already are inventory problems, it could be one solution to let people have their one retainer summonable at all (or nearly all) locations.

Plus if they fix all the memory leaks of the game with a good machine you should be able to push the limits quite a bit.