Idea: Offers

So the MB is sweet but I got an idea while merching that I feel like would add a lot to the game and increase commerce in general which is good for the game's economy.

My proposal is this - allow us to post offers on items that are on the MB. How will this work? Well, say that somebody has posted a stack of 99 Toad Leather for 1.8k each or whatever. This would allow you to 'offer' on the item to tell the seller 'hey, I'll pay 1.2k each and you can sell them right now. So basically you'd select the item, hit Offer from the dropdown list and type in your offer price. This would notify the seller that they received an offer on one of their items. The would then go to their retained and select 'Offers' where you can either accept or decline the offer.

There would have to be limits on these like maybe you can post 5 offers at a time and receive 10 offer requests or something similar. This would *really* help people sell items more quickly especially on servers with lower population or selling items with high prices but low demand. Also, if you've blacklisted someone they can't post offers on your items (to prevent harassment) and you would be able to turn off offer notifications in the options and these wouldn't show up if your in a dungeon.

Also, you would have to have enough Gil to buy the items at your price in order to post an offer. If the person accepts the offer yet you no longer have enough Gil all of your posted offers will be cancelled and maybe you'll be blocked from posting offers for like an hour or so? I dunno, there would also probably have to be something like this in place to prevent possible trolling by making fake offers!

Everquest has something like this, and I think it would be absolutely great.

I'd do it somewhat differently from what you're posting though; I'd make it a little more like what I saw with EQ (because that's what I know and what I see working really well within the current system). Basically, you would have a choice with a retainer : sell stuff on the MB, or put up a purchase order.

Selling puts money onto the retainer, right? Buying would take money off of the retainer. When you use the Marektboard, you would see a new tab at the top : Buying, and Selling. The default would be Selling, where you see what people are selling, and would otherwise be the same thing you see now.

The Buying tab, however, would also look like what we have now; only instead of seeing what people are offering to sell, you would see what people are wanting to buy. As soon as the cash on the retainer dropped below the listed offer, said offer would be removed from the display, so if you only put 1m on the retainer, and put up 5 or 6 offers each at 400k or more, after two the other offers would disappear until you restocked the retainer's cash.

I would make one other alteration to the MB, however : an option to look at the entire listing without any filters whatsoever. While incredibly cumbersome for the Selling tab, it would be incredibly valuable on the Buying side, to see just what people are interested in obtaining.

Sounds fun. A variety is always welcome. Also, it would be nice to have a real auction listing, say limited time with heights bet or insta-buy.

You should have posted this in the suggestion and feedback section.

I'm a bit sceptical about this. If it comes with an option to enable or disable offers then I think I'm all for it. Could be great if you had the ability to partially fulfil offers with gil-alternatives too. For example, someone selling HQ Electrum Rings may be interested in taking part of the cost in something like HQ Electrum Ore or a large bulk of Wind Shards. With the ability for the seller to view these items market values before accepting of course.

In addition to this perhaps give the retainer the ability to post a message with their sale such as "CPW (can pay with) Wind Shards: 1 = 100 gil". Might be too much of a server burden to have a different message for every sale, but if you had one message per retainer for all of that retainers sales, that could work.

It's just a personal thing how I like that my prices aren't up for debate. The advantage of posting under retainer names is that nobody can harass me through PM over the prices I've set. There are only a few things worse than being haggled by someone that won't listen when you tell them the price won't change. Or having a competing seller trying to tell you how to sell.

Setting a retainer as a Buyer rather than a Seller would maintain that degree of separation between customer and vendor.

That said, I am really skeptical of setting up trades rather than straight purchases. But, that would be up to SE to decide, should they ever actually implement any of this.

This is a horrible idea and here is why:
IRL market this work because there are a limited amount on both supply and demand on reality.
In FF14, the supply of gil is relative low (quests, DR, challenge log, in short: the world "print" money slowly) but the goods have an infinit supply and its fast (gathering, then craft them)
So an offer board will cuz: no buyer will ever buy things from the current MB, they want something they will just search the current MB for price then post an offer with lower price.
And then RMT and BOTs will pick 99% of these offer before normal players can even react or borther to react due to super low price 24/7, this will completely crush the economy as normal producer will not be able to make gil. So the low end stuff will be trash vender value and high end stuff will be super expensive cuz RMT will sell more gil which will raise the inflation.

As long as a bot can gather 800 logs per hour this shouldn't be introduce to the game.

You forget about the "instant getification" factor.

If you're planning ahead, then yes, you would use the Buy setting on a retainer to try to get the materials/goods you want.

If your need is acute, and you don't have the luxury of hoping someone wants to sell to you at an offered price, then you will go to the MB and buy directly from someone else's retainer in Sell mode.

And believe it or not, with how quickly stuff can be undercut, a Buy order will likely be left up a while (say, overnight) and the price of the item sought will drop below the Buy order offer. At that point, some enterprising fellow can easily come along, buy the cheap item off the MB, then sell to the Buyer, acting as middleman and making a little profit.

I really don't see your concerns as being valid. Having both buyer and seller in other games works well, bots or no bots.

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Originally Posted by Cooperal

Could be great if you had the ability to partially fulfil offers with gil-alternatives too.

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I love the idea, a "Trade Board". Where you can trade items with other items. To make it realistic, it would share the listing slots of the retainers.

About the idea to trade good for other goods, I don't think that can ever work, it'd overy complicate the whole idea and is best left to direct trades between players.

The buy order idea though, that's decent. In most cases the limit would be the preservation of the money unit, gil in this case. If I put up buy order, the game would have to set some of my money aside so the buyer can be sure to get their pay without me spending it in the middle. However this game offers a good ground for that in the form of the retainers handling the sales, in which case to put up a buy order the retainer needs to have the required money on their pocket.

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Originally Posted by ImDingDing

This is a horrible idea and here is why...

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I don't think you quite got how this would work. Say you post an HQ Boarskin Pot Helm or whatever for 25k. Somebody can offer you, let's say, 20k for it and you get the notification which you can accept or refuse. Bots and RWT can't 'snipe' your offer or whatever because it's just between you and the potential buyer.

People might set up bots to post offers but unless they were realistic they would just get rejected. This is also the reason for the 5 outgoing offers limit. In all likelihood it could take 5+ hours for the person to respond to the offer so they couldn't really spam offers on stuff. They would just post up 5 and then they would sit.

They really need something like this. I'm tired of using PF to post things I WTB. And I'm sure the rest of the population would prefer if it wasn't used for that. Hint Hint SE. Let people post "request to buy." Leave the retainer with the gil necessary.

I see how this could work. Maybe a "Personal Add" kind of system where it goes <Player> Seeking to Buy/Sell < (X) NQ/HQ [Item]>.

And then it could allow offers to be posted for the on sale items, requests to be fulfilled in which you say "Willing to pay (x) Gill for [Item(s)]" and the retainer holds the amount of gill in what would amount to a holding account IRL.

If implemented right this would be an excellent idea. And I highly doubt RMTers and Bots could take advantage of it as it'll likely tip off the GM task force. Or worse, allow the Task Force to set up sting operations by posting rare items for stupid amounts of Gil that only a Gil Seller or their customers could afford.