Get rid of the prices in market search

[Girlie]

+1 for prices, -1 for this thread.

[Lienn]

+1 for prices, -1 for this thread.

Ditto! I love the current MW search with prices. Its excellent for both who is buying and for sellers that are willing to play in a competitive way! ^^

[Anty]

As if the current system wasnt already bad enough by having everyone gathered in one city since nothing is linked...
Not showing prices will only piss more ppl off and have more ppl leave, i see people leaving every day... no need to double that number.

Crafting like it was in ffxi and now even worse is a huge time and material sink. And due to the fact that almost everyone is crafting, since well... its not that much to do atm, we have just way too many items and too few ppl to buy it... and its getting worse every day. If the market ward was put back to the catastrophic usability-status it was before several changes...
i bet more people would just leave and i think i would rather go gathering then searching for hrs in these stupid marked wards. This wouldnt help the economy a tiny bit... supply and demand is way out of hand and its not gonna change until more people come and more recipes (tons more) are being released. I know crafting is a lot of work (well time rather) and you want it to be a money maker but since everyone does it... surprise!!! you are not special at all with what you achieved, sorry ... but thats just how it is.

i first thought the post was a joke, i still hope it is...

[Smokie23]

I ♥ the concept of Supply and Demand.
Showing the cheapest 20 is not a problem but a solution to what half the people already said. Waste of time and inconvenient. Now, if SE put in price history (like XI and showing what price the item was last bought at) or showing the highest 20 then we got a problem. Showing the cheapest 20 is only going to ensure you (the buyer) get your item for the cheapest price. As a buyer AND a seller, I have nothing wrong with that...do you?
I think most people sell pretty decently considering the server populations. If the june patch brings back the players like its suppose to...then the economy will be just fine even the way it is now. Obviously though it can use some tweaks atm.

[VydarrTyr]

I don't have a rank 50 because I quit back in November and only started again a couple weeks ago.

<Welcome Back!>

And for the record, that whole "You're not 50 so no one should listen to you!" is a mind-numbingly silly argument. Is he really suggesting that if you'd just gotten 4 more levels, you'd suddenly know how the Market Wards work? Ridiculous.

[Illy]

Keep prices please? If people wanna waste their time sitting at the wards all day making sure they sell their stuff then so be it they can waste their time doing that and give other players a good deal. Getting rid of the prices will do nothing but annoy and anger a very large number of people which the exact opposite of what SE is trying to do at this point in time.

[Eldaena]

I think what we need instead of the removal of anything is an addition, or rather: more information so people can get a closer idea to the value of the items they are selling. How would one do that? Not only show what people are selling in the search feature, but also what they are buying and for how much. Here is the specifics on this idea I had a little while ago:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ancement-Ideas

[MeowyWowie]

Wow I'm surprised with the amount of people who disagree with the OP. This has become the thing I hate most about the Market Wards at the moment. Yes, it's true that in every game there will be undercutting, it's the nature of an economy. It's the whole reason things cost much more when they're first implemented compared to a few months down the road. It's a matter of supply and demand, and in FFXIV the demand is diminishing much quicker than the supply thanks to the low population.

For the buyer the current system is a godsend. Want an item? Search the wards, memorize the cheapest retainer's name, move to the correct ward and buy it. But that's where the problem lies, a buyer will always buy the cheapest item, even if the difference is a few gil. This makes the current system more manipulative than any other, simply because you can see the exact prices before buying. There is no "comparison." Face it, you're not comparing anything, you're looking at the retainer at the top of the list and buying from them, period. The only exception is if you're looking for HQs. This in turn progresses the phenomenon of undercutting at an accelerated rate and is only damaging an already non-existent economy.

On my server at least, I'm seeing many higher tier items drop millions of gil in price in the matter of a few days, especially NM drops (though the last patch certainly contributed to that.) And I will admit, I am guilty of it myself.

I don't want them to remove prices entirely like it was before they implemented them, no thanks. But something has to change. So here's my suggestion:

Remove the current prices and implement an average price for each item based on sales history. Keep the HQs separate from NQs and separate from each other. Implement a color coded system, Green and Red. Retainers' names who are below the average price or up to let's say 10% higher than the average price will be green, anyone higher will be red. Apply this to the stars above retainers' heads as well while searching. Here's an example:

Dodore Doublet - NQ-3,500,000 +1-5,000,000 +2-7,000,000 +3-10,000,000
-- [NQ] ---------- [+1] ----------- [+2] ------------ [+3]
Retainer1 ------ Retainer7 ------ Retainer10 ------ Retainer11
Retainer2 ------ Retainer8
Retainer3 ------ Retainer9
Retainer4
Retainer5
Retainer6

With this you can quickly see who's prices are fair and who's overpriced, but you have no way of telling who the absolute cheapest is. But no matter which decent priced retainer you go to you will get just that, a decent price. If you're in a rush and just want to buy something quickly you know you won't be getting shafted because you know you're paying an average price. However if you're looking for the best price then you can truly compare prices in exchange for some extra time involved. This is how I would envision a true market system to operate. You want to get a really cheap price on something? Then you have to put a little more effort into it.

Is it perfect? No. But in my opinion it's much better than the system we have now. Will it still allow for undercutting? Of course, but it'll take a little more work than looking at a menu. Will all of you agree with it? Absolutely not, but I'm hoping that some will and that's a start. Either way, if we want our economy to even begin to stabilize a change is needed and this is just one of many possible solutions.

[MarkH]

you're making a generalisation, to me personally if the different in price is less than 10% then i couldn't care less about which one is cheaper, and I would choose to buy base more on convenient. For example, there was a person selling 1 radiant lightning moraine for 9800 and another who were selling 20 for 10000, i need many radiant lightning moraine as I have collected many lightning cluster from leves, so i go to the person with 20 of them.

The price of items is not determine by whether someone know what the current cheapest price is, it is determine by supply and demand and by opportunite cost. People will sell things at whatever the price is that sell and get them more gil than the item is worth to them.

If the price of copper ore is lower than what i feel is worth my time (or if I know of something that I can make more gil from with the same amount of time investment) then i simply won't try to obtain and sell the ore.

Showing the price doesn't encourage undercutting, what encourage undercutting is simply the fact that people feel that the seller before them are selling item at a price wayyyy higher than what the item is really worth. (and as you said yourself, the demand is diminishing much much faster than the supply, meaning that everything should be really really cheap). If they didn't think that the offering are overpriced, then maybe they'll sell it at a lower price, but it'll be just this once as they already went to the trouble of obtaining the item, but rest assure, as they do not find it worthwhile, they won't be selling it again.

FFXI doesn't have this system, and the perle armor set droped from 2M+ to 50k in less than a week.

[MeowyWowie]

You have some good points MarkH. You are correct, convenience does play a large part in it as well. If I'm looking for stacks of one type of item as opposed to just a single one then yes, I will go the more convenient route. However, out of the people selling multiple amounts of a certain item I will still go with the cheapest, provided the amount is worth the time. So in effect the general theory still holds true, it just has more variables than I previously stated.

I think you misunderstood my main point though. I did not say that showing prices encourages undercutting. It just makes it that much easier. I also respectfully disagree with your reason for undercutting. I do not believe, for most people at least, that the reason undercutting takes place is because someone thinks the person before them is too expensive and they in turn drop it to a more reasonable level. In this game especially, nothing is too expensive, though there are items that are unreasonably priced. But that's irrelevant as they are compared to the average price anyways. Nearly everyone I know has tens of millions of gil with basically nothing to spend it on. (No matter what is done to the Market Wards it will not fix this though, we need gil sinks and lots of them.) I believe undercutting is driven by the fact that people want their stuff to sell first, for the most part. It's certainly not the only contributing factor as supply and demand plays a very large part in it as well but I think generally this is the case. I'm sure some people do undercut for the reason you stated, although only a small percentage.

Personally, I don't know how this system, or even my proposed system would play out in a more diverse economy. The game's current population is far too small to draw any conclusions now. Are there or have there been any games with a healthy population and this type of system? I don't know, I haven't played them if there was. If anyone that has seen this type of system with a larger population firsthand can comment on how it worked out I'd be interested. I just feel that it is far too easy to undercut now. And even though undercutting is natural and expected it can be aggravating for those being undercut.

That's just my opinion though. I could be entirely wrong. Perhaps this system just accelerates the rate at which prices stabilize and in the end any system used will ultimately reach the same result.