Feature Suggestion: Overnight, Auto & Multi-crafting & Player shops!

Good evening everyone! Today i would like to present to the community my idea of a feature that can hopefully be implemented into the game in future expansions or patches to give it a breath of life and a sense of community to our already beautiful cities and towns.

As the post is quite long i will break it up into separate posts! Do give me your thoughts on what you think and in what ways we can improve on this feature or if this feature has any place in the game at all.

Player shops!
With the release of Stormblood we were gifted with the chance to visit the beautiful city of Kugane. Kugane is an amazing city however why is such a city empty in certain areas? Naturally, people are going to go about their business near the market boards and relevant NPCs however the rest of the city would never or rarely see life, it will be there just for aesthetics purposes. I hope this feature will result in these areas to eventually be populated by the community.

Below i have highlighted the structures in Kugane that have no apparent purpose as of patch 4.0.1. Areas around these buildings, more noticeably, the northern part of Kugane often rarely has any players.
http://i.imgur.com/TTnjERW.jpg

This also applies to Ala Mhigan Quarters in The Lochs as most of you might know is really empty!
http://i.imgur.com/xNjpRsj.jpg

As such, i propose that we convert these empty buildings into player shops that are rentable! These shops will work like how private apartments work. (in a perfect world there will be no loading time for entering and leaving). Players can have their retainers at the counter to do the sales like how an NPC shop works and the shop itself maybe designed by furniture similar to how housing works. Certain machines can be also implemented in these shops to help crafters and gatherers increase their production which i will explain later on!

But didn't they do that with retainers back in 1.0!? it was horrible and a big mess!
Yes, that is true however it was never done properly like this. In 1.X they allowed everyone with a retainer to have a player shop and "shop" is not the right word to describe it as it was just your retainer standing in the open not a physical shop! This feature aims to be a luxury for crafters who can afford it!
i will address some of the issues that might be brought up with such a system and why they don't pose much of a problem as you may think!

Houses are on a monthly rent basis
Many people have seen an issue with player housing where there are times when one player may be able to buy an entire ward or a section of a ward. To prevent this, these shops will be on a monthly rent basis, every month the shop will take a fee of about 500k to 1000k from the player, should the player not meet the rent for the month, he will be given a week's notice after which the shop will be relinquished and be available to be rented again. The furniture belonging to the player from the shop will be able to be reclaimed from an assigned NPC similar to private chambers in player housing.

500k to 1000k a month? Who would buy that!?
We'll look at what kind of players may want to own a player shop. These players are going to be players focused on gathering and crafting. these players hope to achieve recognition and wider reach by having a physical shop which if done well, majority of players on the server will know where to patronize. The rent amount will pose no problem to these players as the profit outweigh the costs. This also prevents abuse from players who think to use these shops as a "house". These shops are meant for sales and crafting and to players who enjoy doing business hence without profits a normal player will not be able to sustain the shop long term. This price can be adjusted based on server price and demand.

Overnight, Auto & Multi-crafting
To player who own these shops, certain furniture/machinery can be introduced to help increase production offline and online! For example we can have a machine that duplicates all actions performed by the player resulting in x2 yield in products. Players can also assign a machine to produce a certain product while they are offline, they only need to input the actions they want the machine to execute and deposit the needed materials.

Closing note
I understand fully that this feature is totally optional! The game wont die without this feature but having this feature can bring so much life to the quiet parts of the game. More often than not i see players on party finders advertising their houses as "cafes" or "restaurants". Why not have this feature to enable players to gather and socialize, perhaps we'll see a popular player owned cafe that players like to hang around? An alchemy store with cheap wares that raiders love to restock at?

As you're new, I'm going to assume you aren't aware that you can edit your post to get around the 1'000 character limit (since I guess that is why you are breaking it up into multiple posts).

As for feedback on the idea, I'll wait to see it fully fleshed out before I give my feedback.

ADDENDUM:
Alright, now I've seen the idea. I must admit, it's not something I would use, but I fear it would basically make monopolies pretty much a guarantee. I also worry about automated crafting while you're not logged in. I mean sure it's technically possible already but you're breaking ToS AFAIK with it (automation of mouse/keyboard movements for macroing outside of the macro tool provided within FFXIV), whereas this would make it legitimate. Also, not sure if you've seen the housing fiasco, but something like this would also go down like a lead balloon I feel.

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Originally Posted by Paladinleeds

As you're new, I'm going to assume you aren't aware that you can edit your post to get around the 1'000 character limit (since I guess that is why you are breaking it up into multiple posts).

As for feedback on the idea, I'll wait to see it fully fleshed out before I give my feedback.

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Thank you for the heads up! i found this out halfway after i started to post! my bad!:(

They had a player 'shop' area in 1.X. You had to go from retainer to retainer just to find items. We have the Market Board now. Player shops would be moot, due to the MB and the fact you can place retainers on your estate in which people can buy items from directly. So I'm not for that.

Now if they want to make them a place where players can get into, I'm sure there are RPers out there that would like to have their character run a 'shop' for RP purposes.

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Originally Posted by Bacent

They had a player 'shop' area in 1.X. You had to go from retainer to retainer just to find items. We have the Market Board now. Player shops would be moot, due to the MB and the fact you can place retainers on your estate in which people can buy items from directly. So I'm not for that.

Now if they want to make them a place where players can get into, I'm sure there are RPers out there that would like to have their character run a 'shop' for RP purposes.

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Yes! but the problem is that in 1.X they allowed EVERYONE to own a player shop hence to why it was such a huge mess! This feature is a luxury to players who truly enjoy crafting and selling to others. A big goal for crafters which are not interested in raiding or PvE content!

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Originally Posted by CartherineZero

Overnight, Auto & Multi-crafting
To player who own these shops, certain furniture/machinery can be introduced to help increase production offline and online! For example we can have a machine that duplicates all actions performed by the player resulting in x2 yield in products. Players can also assign a machine to produce a certain product while they are offline, they only need to input the actions they want the machine to execute and deposit the needed materials.

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So, basically official botting for already rich crafters to get even richer? No thank you. Your ideas seem to serve an incredibly small slice of the player base - already wealthy omni-crafters. I actually find myself disliking these ideas entirely since they intrinsically create an uneven playing field in which the already rich omni crafters have a further advantage. So, a big old "No thank you." from me.

yeah i have to agree this sounds just like an idea to make the ultra-rich even more richer. no thanks.

Totally agree that this would be awesome. However, in FFXI you were able to pretty much stand and sell stuff from your inventory to circumvent the tax on the AH. On my server we called it the Rolenberry Mall. It took FOREVER, to actually click on everyone to see what they had and in the end you probably wouldn't find anything that you wanted or needed. So I would suggest a way to do a search much like the AH has now to see which shops you need to visit.

The tax in FF14 is not nearly as big as it was in FF11 though and I doubt many crafters would care to try and circumvent it.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

So, basically official botting for already rich crafters to get even richer? No thank you. Your ideas seem to serve an incredibly small slice of the player base - already wealthy omni-crafters. I actually find myself disliking these ideas entirely since they intrinsically create an uneven playing field in which the already rich omni crafters have a further advantage. So, a big old "No thank you." from me.

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Next thing you know, these shops will want a say in how Ala Mhigo gets rebuilt. To help in this effort, they are willing to make donations to local government officials in return for "favors"!

Does all of this sound familiar? LOL

The 'shop' idea is a quick way to eliminate price competition on the Market Board. I don't think it's a good idea.

A horrendous idea, you can't give the means to produce more to just a small sector of the population, also, players shops are stuff that works in a sandbox but not in a theme park if you ask me.

You can already have player shops by just using shout chat and trading goods for gil. Automating it just detracts from the whole thing.

It would be nice to have but not really practical.
In 1.x, we had wards.
1. Lag fest.
2. Impossible to search for anything until they added the search functionality.
3. How many shops do you think they can put in 1 zone? 10? 20? That's super exclusive. People are going to bitch about it worse than housing.