[Suggestion] Revamp Marketboard To Function Like WoW/EVE

Seriously. This needs to happen.

Who's going to buy 50 Calamari Ripieni to craft a couple of items.

There has to be a way to upgrade the Market Board system to allow us to purchase partial stacks from listings.

World of Warcraft (Retail) made the switch. EVE Online has had it since forever.

BONUS: Let us put in buy orders just like in EVE. 'Wishlist' isn't cutting it.

Alternatively, people could just stop selling in stacks greater than what most people want. If you sell a stack of 99 materia you are just selling to pentamelders.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Alternatively, people could just stop selling in stacks greater than what most people want. If you sell a stack of 99 materia you are just selling to pentamelders.

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The issue with that is each 'stack' takes up a Retainer "Sell Slot".

And for me, personally, I'm trying to clear out Retainer inventory from 5+ years of playing (read: pack-ratting). So I have many materials with over 300 quantity, but since they're old they don't move. Though, when they do it's for significantly more than the Vendor Sell price.

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Originally Posted by illutian

The issue with that is each 'stack' takes up a Retainer "Sell Slot".

And for me, personally, I'm trying to clear out Retainer inventory from 5+ years of playing (read: pack-ratting). So I have many materials with over 300 quantity, but since they're old they don't move. Though, when they do it's for significantly more than the Vendor Sell price.

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Maybe you should consider the market and vendor a reasonable stack at a time - you don't have to just flat out sell everything in 99 Stacks, you can sell it in various amounts based on customer need. Have you learned nothing from the Crafter Job Quests in Stormblood?

Being able to buy in partial stacks would basically remove the ability for legit players to compete with the bot farmers so...I'm honestly against it.

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Originally Posted by illutian

Seriously. This needs to happen.

Who's going to buy 50 Calamari Ripieni to craft a couple of items.

There has to be a way to upgrade the Market Board system to allow us to purchase partial stacks from listings.

World of Warcraft (Retail) made the switch. EVE Online has had it since forever.

BONUS: Let us put in buy orders just like in EVE. 'Wishlist' isn't cutting it.

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Just buy them and relist all the ones you don't use back on the AH. Sometimes you can even make a profit by splitting the stack yourself and charging more per item than you paid.

If I want things to sell, I sell in reasonable stacks that people can use or turn in:3, 5, 10, 20. This is a part of the economy right now and if you created an order system the bots would run the show wholesale.

Retainer slots have value, understanding manageable parceling has value, knowing markets has value.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

Maybe you should consider the market and vendor a reasonable stack at a time - you don't have to just flat out sell everything in 99 Stacks, you can sell it in various amounts based on customer need. Have you learned nothing from the Crafter Job Quests in Stormblood?

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A 'reasonable' stack would still leave several Retainers 'preoccupied' with selling items; 'reasonable stacks' tend to be 1 or increments of 5.

And yes, I could put up 5 listings of 1 or 5 at a time. But that's tedious. Games shouldn't be tedious.


Also. I haven't done Job Quests since Heavensward. So, no, I guess I haven't learned anything from the Crafter Job Quests in Stormblood. :P

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

Just buy them and relist all the ones you don't use back on the AH. Sometimes you can even make a profit by splitting the stack yourself and charging more per item than you paid.

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No no. I'm the one with 24 selling in stacks of 3. But there's a competitors that are selling in larger quantities. I just saw that and thought it silly that even though they have it at a cheaper price per unit. They'll likely never sell that many in one go to one person.

Hence the suggestion post.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Being able to buy in partial stacks would basically remove the ability for legit players to compete with the bot farmers so...I'm honestly against it.

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I don't follow. How does being able to buy a partial stack suddenly enable bots to take over?

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Originally Posted by illutian

Seriously. This needs to happen.

Who's going to buy 50 Calamari Ripieni to craft a couple of items.

There has to be a way to upgrade the Market Board system to allow us to purchase partial stacks from listings.

World of Warcraft (Retail) made the switch. EVE Online has had it since forever.

BONUS: Let us put in buy orders just like in EVE. 'Wishlist' isn't cutting it.

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They did that in Wow. After that not even playing the MB was fun anymore...

There's plenty of QOL changes they could do other than that imho.

Buy orders would be a good thing tho :3

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Originally Posted by illutian

I don't follow. How does being able to buy a partial stack suddenly enable bots to take over?

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Bot gathers thousands of units of an item.

Bot lists thousands of units of an item (presumably in a single slot under your system).

Bot sets things up so it automatically undercuts competitor listings by 1 gil.

Bot now has the cheapest thousands of units on the market, and no longer has to worry about parsing out the quantities to remain competitive.

Bot repeats this for however many slots their retainers have.

Basically, it's whatever convenience and advantage a regular player would receive from this system, times however much more time the bot has available to run their gathering script.

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Originally Posted by illutian

No no. I'm the one with 24 selling in stacks of 3. But there's a competitors that are selling in larger quantities. I just saw that and thought it silly that even though they have it at a cheaper price per unit. They'll likely never sell that many in one go to one person.

Hence the suggestion post.

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So... you want other people to make money on the AH instead of you? :confused:

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Originally Posted by YukiB

Bot gathers thousands of units of an item.

Bot lists thousands of units of an item (presumably in a single slot under your system).

Bot sets things up so it automatically undercuts competitor listings by 1 gil.

Bot now has the cheapest thousands of units on the market, and no longer has to worry about parsing out the quantities to remain competitive.

Bot repeats this for however many slots their retainers have.

Basically, it's whatever convenience and advantage a regular player would receive from this system, times however much more time the bot has available to run their gathering script.

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Bots already do that though? The MB is effectively ruined by gathering bots and price adjusters? What point are you making? This almost feels bad faith with how nonsensical it is.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

So... you want other people to make money on the AH instead of you? :confused:

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I want everyone to make money so, personally, yes. This isn't some martyr "everyone should be rich!", but more I want competition to be healthier and more encouraged as opposed to eventually stamped out and controlled by someone who has thousands of a certain thing and intentionally crashes the market on a whim.

Honestly, a blind market board would likely be better - where you could only see the purchase history. and set your price, if someone bids at your price, then great. if they are under the lowest blind price, there is nothing for them to buy. but, this would be a fully preferential change. There are too many other things the devs really need to work on before taking on new projects (ie: hats/hairs - more than what just came out - for hroth and viera - getting the female hroth release, finish the dev on the beta items released, expansion of glamour dresser that's coming, classes fixes so things arent continuously dumbed down).

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Originally Posted by BrokentoothMarch

I want everyone to make money so, personally, yes. This isn't some martyr "everyone should be rich!", but more I want competition to be healthier and more encouraged as opposed to eventually stamped out and controlled by someone who has thousands of a certain thing and intentionally crashes the market on a whim.

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Idk, I've no problem selling as it is even on ARR crafted items (dyes). Just be smart about your stacks. The problem I see is that you already kind of have to have a constant watch over what you put on the board due to bots/undercutters, I just feel like it'd worsen that issue when you have a bunch of bots selling at stacks of 99 and undercutting you, and you have little leeway to sell when some of these bots put listings up within *seconds* of yours, but idk. I won't say that I LIKE the current system, but it's workable even with bots all over the place and ruining the MB.

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Originally Posted by Padudu

Idk, I've no problem selling as it is even on ARR crafted items (dyes). Just be smart about your stacks. The problem I see is that you already kind of have to have a constant watch over what you put on the board due to bots/undercutters, I just feel like it'd worsen that issue when you have a bunch of bots selling at stacks of 99 and undercutting you, and you have little leeway to sell when some of these bots put listings up within *seconds* of yours, but idk. I won't say that I LIKE the current system, but it's workable even with bots all over the place and ruining the MB.

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That's kind of the issue, isn't it? I'm not saying there's no workaround. I'm aware smart-stacking is the way. A lot of my money is made from upcharging materia because of course people would rather pay a slight increase for stacks of 3 instead of the madlads who think dumping 99 across the board is the right move. I just think it shouldn't be my responsibility. Not because of some entitlement or because I deserve it, but because if there's a better system that has been implemented to the point of being standard, I have to wonder why it isn't standard.

To say nothing that this would drive down prices on a lot of controlled or overpriced markets. The game has been happy with gil sinks lately that strike mostly the midcore crowd, but has done little to adjust pricing on the MB. I'm not for artificial manipulating of prices from the devs, of course, so the remaining option is to standardize the MB.

At least how I think things.

Bots will only undercut stacks of items if you are listing the exact same amount of items as them at a lower price, therefore you can circumvent their scripts by just listing a different quantity.

Things like crafted gear don't have this luxury which as a side effect tends to result in all but the most determined of legit players getting chased out of the market due to pressure from the undercut spamming.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Bots will only undercut stacks of items if you are listing the exact same amount of items as them at a lower price, therefore you can circumvent their scripts by just listing a different quantity.

Things like crafted gear don't have this luxury which as a side effect tends to result in all but the most determined of legit players getting chased out of the market due to pressure from the undercut spamming.

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What? That's not true at all. Bots look at the lowest price and undercut by 1 gil nonstop until it reaches the bottom of their programmed window. I don't know where you got your information, but it's either straight wrong or you're aware of some pretty bad bots. If it was that easy to circumvent, why on EARTH would botting be efficient? Everyone would just sell in stacks of 98.

Crafted gear, though, is obviously agreed to be one of the worst hit.

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Originally Posted by illutian

Who's going to buy 50 Calamari Ripieni to craft a couple of items.

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You will, and then you'll put them back on the marketboard when your done with them.

Squenix will take a cut when you buy them, and take another when you sell them, and that removes gil from the game.

And then you'll complain on the message board, and nothing else will happen.

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Originally Posted by BrokentoothMarch

That's kind of the issue, isn't it? I'm not saying there's no workaround. I'm aware smart-stacking is the way. A lot of my money is made from upcharging materia because of course people would rather pay a slight increase for stacks of 3 instead of the madlads who think dumping 99 across the board is the right move. I just think it shouldn't be my responsibility. Not because of some entitlement or because I deserve it, but because if there's a better system that has been implemented to the point of being standard, I have to wonder why it isn't standard.

To say nothing that this would drive down prices on a lot of controlled or overpriced markets. The game has been happy with gil sinks lately that strike mostly the midcore crowd, but has done little to adjust pricing on the MB. I'm not for artificial manipulating of prices from the devs, of course, so the remaining option is to standardize the MB.

At least how I think things.

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The madlads are the reason why I make money though so I have to give it to them lol. But yeah, fair point. IMO, I don't think there's a true workaround or solvability until SE seriously deals with the botting issue, but uh, that's never going to happen.

Still, other than solving the tedious problem of not being able to buy from a 99 stack, I don't really see that much improvement. I guess I don't see how this would really affect the controlled pricing - things are already low as they are for mats, and wouldn't people be able to artificially drive prices either way? I just don't see it changing much :S But I never played a game with a marketboard like WoW/EvE's, so that may be why I'm missing it lol.

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Originally Posted by illutian

I don't follow. How does being able to buy a partial stack suddenly enable bots to take over?

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it doesn't, and bots already own the market board on many servers lmao,

if anything, this would disincentivize undercutting if ran like WoW's, which also does a "last one in, first one out" system, throw in a short cooldown for relists that way to prevent repeatedly removing and re-adding and it's imo a way better system

also, clean up the marketboard and listing uis in general, it's ridiculous that you need to go to 2 seperate entrypoints to do things relating to the MB, and the listing ui is awful, loads of un-necessary extra clicks to get where you wanna go

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Originally Posted by Padudu

The madlads are the reason why I make money though so I have to give it to them lol. But yeah, fair point. IMO, I don't think there's a true workaround or solvability until SE seriously deals with the botting issue, but uh, that's never going to happen.

Still, other than solving the tedious problem of not being able to buy from a 99 stack, I don't really see that much improvement. I guess I don't see how this would really affect the controlled pricing - things are already low as they are for mats, and wouldn't people be able to artificially drive prices either way? I just don't see it changing much :S But I never played a game with a marketboard like WoW/EvE's, so that may be why I'm missing it lol.

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WoW's system gives a "last one in, first one out" system, effectively meaning there's no reason to undercut as you'll be first in the queue when you pop it into the pile, in my experience it worked wonders for the auction house there no longer being completely run by AH scanners, bots, and addons

OP how dare you to suggest something reasonable and good? We aren't used to good so we have to defend the poop we have

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Originally Posted by DezereDawn

WoW's system gives a "last one in, first one out" system, effectively meaning there's no reason to undercut as you'll be first in the queue when you pop it into the pile, in my experience it worked wonders for the auction house there no longer being completely run by AH scanners, bots, and addons

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I am very for this idea. Especially the cooldown on marketboard price adjustments. To say nothing that I'm tired of clicking seventeen different ways to do simple things to sell and see no reason why collecting my money has to pull my products from the board. There's just so many unrefined mechanics like this in this game that I have to wonder how this has gone on for so long.

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Originally Posted by DezereDawn

WoW's system gives a "last one in, first one out" system, effectively meaning there's no reason to undercut as you'll be first in the queue when you pop it into the pile, in my experience it worked wonders for the auction house there no longer being completely run by AH scanners, bots, and addons

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Ahh ok! In that case I can get on board with it. That's actually a pretty neat system to have & mends the problem with the bots a little. Thanks for explaining a bit. :)

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Originally Posted by illutian

A 'reasonable' stack would still leave several Retainers 'preoccupied' with selling items; 'reasonable stacks' tend to be 1 or increments of 5.

And yes, I could put up 5 listings of 1 or 5 at a time. But that's tedious. Games shouldn't be tedious.

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Agreed, if they let me post 20 stacks of 5 with 1 button click then I'm all for it.

But I'm not about to manually split a stack of 99, 20 times just to have to click them in and type my price in (even using ctrl+V) and double check that I'm not selling the whole stack. Just to have to do that 20 times each with 5 different mats.

If I had a 1 button push where I could set the stack to 5, set my price per stack and then the amount of stacks I want to sell, then I wouldn't have a problem selling split stacks.

But until that happens you can buy 99 off of me. Do whatever you want with the other 94.

People being too stupid to sell things in reasonable stacks is how I make money.

You can sell smaller stacks of things for nearly triple the cost and people will always buy.

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Originally Posted by illutian

There has to be a way to upgrade the Market Board system to allow us to purchase partial stacks from listings.

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1.0 had it. or rather 1.2 at least.
Sellers had a little tick box on anyhting they listed on the market boards that toggle partial sales on or off.

So

If a seller listed 99 ingots and didnt tick that box then a buyer could ONLY buy the full stack of 99.
If a seller listed 99 inogots and did tick the box, then a buyer could buy any number they wanted, 1, 3, 18, 40, all 99

Vastly better than the current system. the current system tends to cause gils to stagante because it becomes more desirable to just go and gather your own materials than buy what you need off the markets. I need 14 logs... do i buy 99 or take 90 seconds travelling to and chopping a tree..

That said though EVE Online had the best market system i'd ever used when i played it, dunno if its changed much, but it helped keep prices super stable and cut down on a lot of undercutting..

player A has a sell order 100,0000 minerals at 150isk

Player B has a buy order for 100,000 minerals at 125isk.

player C comes along with 100,000 minerals to sell he has a choice, he can either list them as a sales order for maybe 149 isk and wait for a buyer. or he can sell them instantly to player B at 125isk

took out a lot of the undercutting from people wanting quick sales.

one of the issues XIV has is people crash the markets stupidly.. you can have 8 or 9 people selling stacks of 50-99 ingots for 1k each. scroll down a little bit and find people selling smaller stacks of 1-4 infgots at 4k each.. check the price history and see those smaller stacks are selling faster than the larger ones... and then players come along see the top price at 1000 gil and then procedd to sell there 2 ingot at 999 gil instead of 4k... then they complain they cant make any money..

There's a lot of pointed things being said without anyone trying to tackle many of the concerns. As an EVE Online player (and GW2 way back) I am immensely frustrated with the way the Final Fantasy XIV market works. EVE Online is 80% market and 20% other stuff and I don't see why those systems cannot be ported into Final Fantasy XIV. When this is brought up there's always some argument "but that will cause XYZ" and the subject is dropped. However, many times I think to myself "well, EVE actually has a solution to that", how else does a game survive 20 years? There's also this tendency to look at features in isolation rather than holistically. If one thing changes it's obvious there will be rippling effects which necessitate other changes, which can be solved.

Let's start with stacks. I see comments that sell orders are created at certain quantities "because that's what sells." Okay great, but that's not an argument. That's a statement of fact. This statement has no baring on the interactions at play if buyers are given an easier interface of "buy x at y price immediately." Maybe I'm dumb, but I see no benefit to the seller nor the buyer for a system like this. If I have ten (10) of something most people only want one (1) of then I have to split my order into ten (10) sell orders and use up all those retainer slots rather than just one that can be auto-split by the system. Benefit? I think not. Almost nothing changes for things that sell in bulk either. If I want to sell 250 of something I just list 250 of them. The only difference being I might see the number of items I'm selling go down over three days rather than disappear all at once.

The removal of stacks will also remove part of the "selling game" for some people. It seems some like finding the perfect price / stack ratio and it's part of their enjoyment. I can buy into that. But does this system serve a better overall game? No.

continued post 2.. yay character limit..

continued from previous ..

If auto-splitting was implemented there are a number of UI and system level changes that also need to be changed. The UI should bundle all sell orders of the same price. As a buyer I don't care who is selling the item I just want to know how much it costs and how many are available at that price point. This makes it even easier for controller players! Less menuing! You tell the game buy X at Y and everything happens. You don't have to select and purchase 25 orders just to get the 10000 items you want. It should also be said that orders are fulfilled in "first in, first out". The oldest order (one posted first) gets filled first. So if A sells 5 X at 10 gil and B sells 5 X at 10 gil and C buys 7 X at 10 gil then the result is C buys 5 from A and 2 from B.

There also seems to be some misconception that this new UI and way of purchasing will increase bot activity or make it easier on bots since they don't have to worry about "what quantity stack will sell?" Any sufficiently advanced bot is already taking this into account, so I think the issue is moot. A botter is going to bot.

The bigger, more general, concern is undercutting. And I agree. Removing the "stack game" does make it significantly easier to undercut. But there's a simple solution to this. Taxes / broker fees. EVE Online has a broker fee to post the sell order and then a sales tax on completion of the transaction [1] This gives the developers two knobs to tweak should the need arise. I believe GW2 had a single tax (I don't really remember) which could be harder to balance. This means you have to commit to any given price and if you want to change it you need to pay another fee. This is the incentive to not play the "undercut every ten minutes" game. Not to mention, Final Fantasy XIV doesn't have enough Gil sinks. Why do you think Square removed the 999 gil limited on teleports? To increase the Gil sink.

As I mentioned before, changing something causes issues elsewhere. If a broker fee was added to listings then the retainer system would need to be updated. Currently you have to rescind all sell orders just to make a new one due to retainer inventory. This will need an overhaul such that you're not paying broker fees over and over again. I'm not going to get into how this could be changed, but one thing that should remain the same is limiting the number of sell orders someone can have, again EVE online does this too.

I can also go into buy orders, but as a game that's not focused so heavily on market activity I don't know if they're necessary. It just means people could buy items cheaper if they want to wait. It also sets a lower limit on how much an item may be worth. I've gone on long enough, so I'll end this here.


[1] https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-...-and-Sales-Tax


tldr; you can't just change "one" thing and expect the system to work. You need to overhaul the system.

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Originally Posted by illutian

Seriously. This needs to happen.

Who's going to buy 50 Calamari Ripieni to craft a couple of items.

There has to be a way to upgrade the Market Board system to allow us to purchase partial stacks from listings.

World of Warcraft (Retail) made the switch. EVE Online has had it since forever.

BONUS: Let us put in buy orders just like in EVE. 'Wishlist' isn't cutting it.

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+ Guild wars 2 has it too.
As someone who buys and sells a lot. I wholly support the overhaul and would really appreciate it a lot.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Alternatively, people could just stop selling in stacks greater than what most people want. If you sell a stack of 99 materia you are just selling to pentamelders.

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this wouldn't happen as often if people had more than 20 slots to sell on the MB but that would mean square wouldn't be able to charge you for a third retainer.

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Originally Posted by BrokentoothMarch

What? That's not true at all. Bots look at the lowest price and undercut by 1 gil nonstop until it reaches the bottom of their programmed window. I don't know where you got your information, but it's either straight wrong or you're aware of some pretty bad bots. If it was that easy to circumvent, why on EARTH would botting be efficient? Everyone would just sell in stacks of 98.

Crafted gear, though, is obviously agreed to be one of the worst hit.

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Perhaps they were upgraded at some point, but for the longest time they weren't smart enough to dynamically adjust undercuts based on stack size, at least on my server.

Though something works regardless is selling in smaller quantities at a slight mark-up because not all people want to buy in stacks of 99.

buy orders please. let them take a retainer slot. i think this might be the best bang for buck improvement change

Yes please. I refuse to buy these ridiculous huge stacks of materials I'll only ever reasonably use like 3-5 of at a time. I'll literally go out and gather it myself before dealing with that crap unless I'm in a big rush for some reason. It's annoying.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Being able to buy in partial stacks would basically remove the ability for legit players to compete with the bot farmers so...I'm honestly against it.

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Legitimate players are already struggling to compete against bot farmers :/ Especially considering bot farmers have more retainer slots by the virtue of having more retainers and the fact that they have accounts that do nothing but sit at the bell all day changing prices to make sure their items sell over yours.

Bots are not a good enough reason to deny us quality of life features. If bots are going to run rampant with the use of QoL, then they're probably already running rampant.

The reason EVE's economy works despite extremely robust buying and selling tools is because A: Material leaves the economy extremely quickly and B: Purchasing has locationality which means shipping and recieving goods has a real time sink involved, allowing people who enjoy economic gameplay to still generate value by doing things like day trading and shipping stuff about.

Buy orders in EVE result in people who don't care about profit margins just dumping their goods for people to recycle into base mats or resell in non-tradehubs. In FFXIV it would probably crash the precraft market because suddenly way WAY more monster parts would flood the board. This is valuable in EVE because it helps keep (destroyable) equipment affordable and because there are no base vendors, but in XIV it would be highly undesirable for anyone who actually interacts with the economy as it currently stands.

Stacking sell orders that allow individual items to come off the stack would also make the battle over price drops "worse" in the sense that the market would not rebound from rapid drops in price basically ever, as someone with a mega-stack of something would eternally create a price ceiling. You would get to a rational price point faster in cases of extreme overcharging but would take much, MUCH longer to get out of price slumps in the current system, even for highly traded items.

If, upon your gear losing all durability, it was destroyed (which is a terrible idea mind), we would have a different story, but as is the fact the market is janky is what allows crafting to be profitable in the first place.

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Originally Posted by dezzmont

If, upon your gear losing all durability, it was destroyed (which is a terrible idea mind), we would have a different story, but as is the fact the market is janky is what allows crafting to be profitable in the first place.

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If used to be that getting it to 100% spiritbond and then "extracting" materia from it destroyed the gear. They changed that several expansions ago. It meant people would be wearing endgame gear at 100% spiritbond for the duration of a patch.

I'm not sure the Market Board can be fixed, that thing is FUBAR.