Auction House.... Do we really need it?

The current item search with prices for the market wards is more like a mini AH. Even if SE put an AH in this game, it wouldn't keep players to undercut items to sale them fast. The market wards as it is now are facing the same thing..,, "UNDERCUTTING ITEMS". So my question for other player's are..., Do we need an AH? if so, what would happen to the retainers in the wards? Would we be better off if there's no item search so that other player's wouldn't undercut items and give players and new gamers a chance to earn gil? There's a better way that the wards can be used for!!!!

We need hq search results and then the rest of the game fixed first. Maybe an ah before ps3 release. Market wards to transition to replace afk bazaars as the game ages.

We're never coming to terms on an AH, so that probably ers on the side of them adding it.

No, we don't, as the market wards can easily expanded in their functionality to work as an auction house, and even better.

But there are several threads about this already, so you might want to search for them and post there, instead of breaking the forum rules with your very first post.

Undercutting prices is part of any economy and I don't really think that anyone's reasoning for or against putting in an AH has anything to do with that.

My question to you is why can't new players earn gil? I re-started on a different server not that long ago and as a crafting focused player, I am making gil just fine. People aren't going to charge less than what would give them some margin of profit for the item they crafted. New players are able to charge those prices as well. If someone is selling something for below cost to make, it is usually a one off, or the person is crazy and will bankrupt his or herself in short order.

Who cares about whether or not we really need Auction House? What we really need is another thread about it.

Oh, I see you have that covered. Carry on.

My only problem with the Market Wards is how they're constantly crashing on me and kicking my retainers out. -.-

A thread with no tags.
And I'm not addin one this time!
We should make all topics about the AH to be about PIE.

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Originally Posted by Peregrine

A thread with no tags.
And I'm not addin one this time!
We should make all topics about the AH to be about PIE.

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Why do you people always do this? Pie is teh awful.

This thread is now about waffles.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Peregrine

A thread with no tags.
And I'm not addin one this time!
We should make all topics about the AH to be about PIE.

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I like PIE. It helps me HQ.

But seriously though this is something that we can no longer help the devs with. There is nothing new under the sun to say. If they add an AH they know why many would like to see it stay away and should design accordingly. If they don't add it, they know why many would like it. Same plan.

The time for talk is over. The devs have what they need to render a decision.

Yes we still need an Auction House IF they keep the wards this small and separated.

It would be nice if the wards were 1 big open-zone with districts for categorization and you could just use the search feature and run over to the district without having to zone. That is the most annoying part of the Wards, the zoning.

Preferably a well lit room or outside. Come on SE!

Your complaint about under-cutting prices is called "Capitalism." It isn't a feature of an Auction House. It's just part of normal human nature. We want to get the most profit for the least amount of work. Add in supply and demand, and you'll get a person who wants to sell their goods quickly, so they'll sell them for just a little under what the competition is selling them for.

To be honest, the market ward system is a joke. The only difference from what we have now, and an "auction house" is if they added the option to just buy the piece from the item-search menu. That's it. If they did that, it would be an auction house. I don't get what is so important for us to navigate through a small, crowded room to get to some guy with a star over his head.

I know SE's intent was to make the game more "community driven." But fact of the matter is that the bazaar system only worked well because there was an auction house. They got the idea from the bazaar in Rolanberry Fields. Sure, it was a neat thing that occurred on a lot of FFXI servers. But you never see an archer running through all of them looking for arrows. It was something to do in our free time, like going window-shopping in a mall. If you know the item you're looking for, (as most shoppers do), go to the AH. If you're bored and want to see what some people are making, go hang out in the bazaar area for a while. The fact that SE wanted to force us to use the bazaar method would have been laughable, if I hadn't had to experience it first hand. Simply, it left us without an efficient means of trade.

Honestly, the only thing they need to do to "perfect the system" is let me buy it at the search-window, and maybe add a price-history function for when I want to sell something but have no idea what the going price for it is.

But for all intensive purposes, it's an Auction House already. I go to the counter, look for the item I want, and then I just have to go find the NPC that's holding it. I don't see why people complain they don't want an Auction House when we already have one. It's just making it about two minutes shorter of an experience. (Between warping in and out, and finding the jerk in a sea of NPCs that just stand there... doing nothing... Real immersive market place, I tell ya).

I would like to have an auction house.

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Originally Posted by Maxious

Even if SE put an AH in this game, it wouldn't keep players to undercut items to sale them fast. The market wards as it is now are facing the same thing..,, "UNDERCUTTING ITEMS".

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In a normal market, the only way prices go down is through undercutting. It would be ridiculous to force people to sell their hundreds of Marmot Pellets for 100k each because heaven forbid we should undercut the guy who wants to sell it for 100k. All you end up doing is rendering the Market Wards / Auction House useless as people will find other ways to get a proper deal.

(I was going to say Pelts, but Pellets seemed so much more funny :p )

IMO the wards have two severe cons that really don't help it in the long run.

The first is the limits of retainers at per ward, while they can expand it'd just make running to find the NPC selling your item(s) just that more annoying.

The second is the wards aren't universal, so to put it simply: Unless you're in Ul'Dah good luck finding anything.

The wards have certainly been improved a lot since their initial release. The search functionality made them much more usable. If additional functionality is added to allow sorting and filtering of items based on various conditions such as recommended / required class, level, etc then I think they could be kept.

Another option I think could work would be replacing all the retainers with stores setup around the stands in the market wards, with each stall selling a particular type of item. Players could sell their items to the stores for a set price, and other buy them for a set price. It would give SE more control over the buying and selling price of items to give more control over the economy, whether this is a good or bad point is debatable. The prices NPC would pay for the items could vary depending on current stock levels with NPCs refusing to buy them if stock levels become too high.

I think the "Wards" is working just fine, but as someone pointed out, it needs to have search option for High Quality items too.

And well, Auction House.... sure but i wouldnt want it to replace my retainers, i could live with having both.

Yes we do this was voted already, moving on.

Market wards will still be inferior to auction house until it's turned into one. Ah doesn't suffer from ward overcrowding, selling items in the wrong ward, zoning, retainer reset after crash, etc. market ward system is inherently inferior and not fixable

we need another AH like we need another thread about Ah's....

in case you missed the sardonic tone there.....

No.

Before the latest couple patches, I was all for an AH.

Since the latest, I would say both is a welcomed thought. You have your hometown bazaars for selling multiple items, seeking repairs, and not to mention storage space. Then there is the AH which if it's like xi at all, would have access to items throughout many new regions or outposts that are added. (Kazham, etc).

With the item search feature just needing a few tweaks, I'd say once battle mechanics are fixed, and closer to the ps3 release when the game is nearly 'ready'.. I would welcome the addition of the AH.. but not a replacement.

I think Market Wards are the future as much as I did want an AH I think the wards could be even better.

If they make the layout of item search a bit better and add options to sort by class, rank and other things that would be a big help. Also add HQ results and the ability to type in an item for a quick search.

Yes wards are not and never will be as fast as as simply buying something from the AH but with wards I can sell half a stack of items and not need to sell them individually or have a full stack like what would be needed for an AH. People can come up and buy the amount they need quicker if say they needed 20 of an certain item. Also with wards I often go and buy an item from someone and find they are also selling something else at a nice price so I get that too.

Also without price history it makes it difficult for a price to be set on certain items so you sell it at what you feel like it is worth. I have been up many times to sell an item and seen there are none in stock so I have to figure out how much I think it's worth, maybe I priced it way to low, but I made that choice and obviously I was comfortable with selling at that price otherwise I wouldn't have put it up for that price. I have recently been looking for Bow's for my Archer and the prices varied greatly, someone was wanting 400k for it and the person next to him wanted 80k obviously both feel that is how much the item is worth and if the 80k one wasn't there I would have to ask is 400k a good price for that bow and decide.

If they could fix the frequent crashing and add more search and filter options I believe they will be better than an AH.

Yes, we need an AH

"Do we really need it?" - OP

No we don't and I hope this isn't a priority for SE.

I don't think there is an urgent need for one. I can, at the moment, find items I require very quickly in the wards and just as quickly buy them and be on my way.

Just a few things to consider.

The current market wards system functions quite like an auction house. so in that reguard, I wouldn't say an auction house is "top priority". But. The population of the game isn't very high either, I've mentioned this in previous similar posts. How would the market wards look if there was 4-5000 players online on a server. An example. You zone into say the battlecraft wards, there's some 8-10,000 retainers there. You wait who knows how long for them to load, then walk over to the one you're after. Then you try to target it among all those others retainers.

Another point to consider, future players. Having an auction house is a pretty common to most online games, and having one would be a familiar item that future players could relate with when deciding whether or not to purchase/play the game. I'm not trying to say the game should should change everything just to suit future players, but it is worth thinking on.

And someone previously mentioned undercutting. While this may frustrate some, including myself, I think it is essential to the economy. Thus having a way to compare prices is a need (the wards system has it now I know). I mean, imagine if I had the only sheepskin up for sale. Technically I could charge you 50mil for it if I wanted to. Of course you probably wouldn't feel its worth that, so you would go out and farm your own. But competitive pricing is what makes the ecocomy functional. And supply and demand is a very crucial factor in determing the pricing of items.

I would like an auction house myself, but I don't feel it should be "top priority" right now. The market wards system has been changed to act almost like an auction house now, and future changes I would see a need for only further create the wards into more of a seudo-auction house. It looks like a lot of work has been done, and is going to be done, just to change the wards into an ah, why not just make it an ah.

I think the best solution would be a cross between the two, get rid of the wards as Aldwin said population is low at the minute and they still crash, what will happen if they turn the game around and server populations double. Have a counter you can go to that will allow you to look for a certain item and see who is selling it and how much for and you can buy it there and then. With that you would obviously buy the cheapest one so undercutting would happen, but it is going to happen anyway no matter what you do.

RMT's or anyone really could abuse the AH with it's price history as you would look at that and see oh thats how much it sells for I'll put it up for that or I will pay that much so it could be abused easily. By removing the price history that will not be so easy as they would actually have to have that item up for sale for people to see the price, so they would not be able to control the prices as they did in FFXI.

An example would be the price of rings in FFXI you would look at the price history and see oh they are only 80k I'll get one but it would very rare that you could buy one for that price unless you were very lucky. What they were doing was trying to trap people selling the ring to look and see oh it's 80k i'll put mine up for that price then the RMT/player would buy it cheap when in reality it was worth 500k and then when they had a few of them they would sell and buy them back from each other to change the price history back to 500k and sell them at the increased price no prob because according to the price history that is how much the ring was worth.

By taking the best bits of the AH and the MW and combining them would make things better for everyone I believe, but that's just my opinion.

Personally no I don't think we need a auction house. Being someone who plays both FFXI and FFXIV I can say that buying via the market wards is now equal to or faster then buying from the auction house in FFXI. Reason being that FFXI has become so bloated with items that nearly every catagory takes forever to load and until it does you can't do anything and have to wait and then there is waiting to see if your bid gets the item which takes a few seconds every time.

FFXIV on the other hand is far faster in it's menu and if you know what you are looking up you can find it and see the price and where it is in a time frame that's faster then the menu loading in FFXI so comparing FFXI and FFXIV the buy experience is better.

Selling is still a bit of a issue but that can easily be fixed. As some have mentioned we should be able to tell our retainers to sell stuff via a NPC pearl which makes perfect since and doesn't seem out of the range of possibility.

But as far as buying goes I think we are all set and selling isn't SO cumbersome that we need a AH for that single purpose.

The thing that's great about the current system is it doesn't let the gil sellers mess with the economy all that much. If they try jacking something up like they did in FFXI no one will buy it other players keep things in check easier in FFXIV then they could in FFXI. Mainly because you can see everyone who is selling and what they are selling it at instead of only seeing the number and going on what it sold for in the past. Having played through the days of 60k+ beehive chips in FFXI I don't really want to see that happen to FFXIV.

If they:

1) Let you teleport next to the retainer selling the item you click on from the Search Counter.
2) Let you access the Search Counter while talking to your retainer so it's easier to check prices and put items up.
3) Place your retainer in the correct ward automatically whenever he/she has a Bazaar up, every time he/she is dismissed (regardless of where from)

Then I'd be more or less pleased with the market ward system.

I said this somewhere else, but while the current system is definitely usable, it's not what it should be. With the current wards we surpased old EQ1's market system: a game that's over 10 years old. That's not where we should stop, is it?

It's not a matter of do we 'need' it, it's a matter of does it add convenience and ease of play to the game? And yes, it does. It also brings with it the issue of undercutting, but I think it'll be a good feature to add to the game regardless.

Yes, we need an AH.

If they changed up the ward system a little bit, it would be nice. For example, like letting you browse a certain item from the wards of all three cities while you are only situated within one of them. It makes it easier on me (and perhaps for others as well), when you don't have to travel from city to city looking for the said certain item and their possible differing prices.

LOL undercutting players lol. You must be a communist or socialist since you don't like capitalism which is what the system in this game is. But seriously we NEED an auction house. The market wards is really just stupid, Its an auction house already just in a really shitty form. I don't see why people like the market wards when the AH system from FFXI worked so much better and took up alot less space then the current system. All they need to do is put in an AH and allow you to either put a large amount of items on the AH for sale or let us keep our retainers just to act as a giant storage bin. Or omg this might sound crazy but a mog house?

I don't understand why people defend the marketplace when its practically a less "practical" AH; i.e., it less convenient. Yes I say we need an AH. At first I didn't care, even when the Market Place didn't have a search feature, but now I find it pointless not to have one. Its easier, I want an item, I stand in one spot, search for it, find it, bid on it, get it. Simple as that. The Market Place is so boring, its not like there's anything special going on. The only reason SE still has it in place is because they had plans to charge you extra for each extra retainer you buy, that's it...

The ward system is complete trash. Once they add in mailboxes we will get an AH. How an MMO ships in 2010 without a mailbox is ridiculous.

Yep, we needs it.

Yes we need it.