Don't Ruin the economy with an auction house! please![dev1019]

[Masamune]

How are you people having problems with the MW? If you need to sell something, you sell it. Just check the prices of it already selling and set the price appropriately, if no price then make your own. You need to buy something? Just use the item seek function. How is this complicated? Zoning takes 5 seconds, unless you are all using some dinosaur of a dial-up.
The only reason to have a history is for the purpose of making money, which is both useless right now and going to be dominated by high-level crafters anyways.

Sad you can't make money off of leveling a crafting item? Use local leves. Ta-Da! You are now making money leveling up.
And if this is too slow for you, toughen up and NPC the items. No pain, no gain.

[Ceons]

cause npc'ing the items is so fast? lol takes like 3-5seconds to sell every item.

[weeble]

i don't want an ah, on top of that i don't like the changes they keep adding to the system we do have. it is becoming worse or same as an ah. it is as bad as warhammer type ah, and way worse then the ffxi system in my opinion already. i woudn't complain if they removed all the functions to find stuff, people are asking for an ah, what the hell do u call what we have anyway, only difference is now then before is you gotta take 2seconds to port to the item. are we all blind or something?

[Cairdeas]

i don't want an ah, on top of that i don't like the changes they keep adding to the system we do have. it is becoming worse or same as an ah. it is as bad as warhammer type ah, and way worse then the ffxi system in my opinion already. i woudn't complain if they removed all the functions to find stuff, people are asking for an ah, what the hell do u call what we have anyway, only difference is now then before is you gotta take 2seconds to port to the item. are we all blind or something?

Its not an AH if it doesn't have Blind or Timed bidding, which is the two things I do not want.

[Irana]

An auction house would make me actually bother to put items up for sale.

The retainer system is so BAD.

[Irana]

i don't want an ah, on top of that i don't like the changes they keep adding to the system we do have. it is becoming worse or same as an ah. it is as bad as warhammer type ah, and way worse then the ffxi system in my opinion already. i woudn't complain if they removed all the functions to find stuff, people are asking for an ah, what the hell do u call what we have anyway, only difference is now then before is you gotta take 2seconds to port to the item. are we all blind or something?

Are you serious? So you enjoy either walking for a period of 1 hour from limsa to grid with ZERO guarantee that theres an item? Or do you enjoy having to walk into each different type of ward in search of that ONE item that you have no idea if ANYONE in the whole market in a city has it or not?

The search function was a great step forward.

[Gicker]

I don't think there's an economy to ruin right now. I think the economy is already ruined. There needs to be more money sinks, more things to make money have worth. Right now we're seeing insane inflation, with the shard and mat-gathering bots making things worse by the day. An auction house or a similar implementation using the retainer system, would make things better. Equipment might start being sold for amounts more equivalent to the disposable income of someone of the appropriate level for that item.

[Zenaku]

Playing a little more now and i have to say we really need a auction house. There players selling items for 3k and for the same item up to 20k+ it make no sense. Top of that the item you really need are not even on there for low level class and there even players putting item for 999.999.999 o.o. I no longer want this Ward system i think we do best with a AH where all players are forced to sell a item for a price right now we have no economy a auction house would really fix this issue...

So please SE make a Auction house.

[Killjoy]

The sales history defines the price of an item.
Since there is a history this defines the going rate for an item. In FFXI for me this caused me to need to be close to 100 to make money off my craft. This is BS, I do not want this same problem in this game and neither do you. It's going to happen with an AH / sale history, it's a bad idea. This is why the developers decided upon an alternate solution, the market wards.
Market wards are like rolanberry fields. It's a way to sell items without paying that fee to put them up. This works well for all types of weapons.

The bad economics are not caused by not having an auction house, it's caused because people have no way of telling what other people desire, therefore everyone including yourself is convinced we need an auction house. It's because a sales history is how we decided which items to sell or farm or make. Sales histories caused that vital flaw in the economy though and we do not need it or want it.

Rather we have the tools to decipher what people want, they're just not using it the way they could be. Retainers have the ability to sell. Restricting this to just items in our possession however is not helping us communicate to others what we need. If they gave us the abilities to get our retainers to search for what we need, all our commerce (trading of goods) problems would be solved.

I for one will start farming materials so crafters don't need to, but how the hell am I supposed to tell what to farm?

I don't agree with you. Some server economies may have been different but that was the biggest part of my enjoyment from FFXI, the Auction House. I didn't have a single craft in the 90's and I loved making gil at each level range of my craft. I researched npc prices, AH prices from farmers, found the best deals, and leveled my craft with profit in mind. It was much more enjoyable than the current level-as-crafter system that FFXIV has since the market ward system is a complete joke.

The fundamental idea behind running a business is to have a good location where your items are easily available. After that you can work on reducing your production price or inventory cost and weeding out the other guys if necessary. For example: ever buy a roll of film, disposable camera, or batteries at a tourist spot? Expensive, right? Those products didn't necessarily cost more to make, but they were able to charge more because the products were available. That was always an option in FFXI if you couldn't compete on the AH. Also, there was no need to make the product yourself in the first place, you could make good money in XI simply buying discount items on the AH and selling them in Bazaar elsewhere. I did it all the time.

The problem with the Market Ward system is that it's basically as you say, an implementation of Rolanmart -- where people would Bazaar high priced items for one general reason: to avoid paying city tax. It was not about location. It was not about the thrill of looking at 100 player characters and checking what they had listed. Often times you checked the same person 2, 3, 10 times by luck of the Tab-draw. It was painful, but there was a benefit to doing it. You kept the money the game was designed to take out of the system.

There is no benefit to the Market Ward system now unless you create enough bad factors to highlight the benefits. Really, in essence, that requires making the ability to buy and sell goods from other players outside of the Wards a bad idea, or less beneficial. It has to. Less cost of taxes is really the only benefit you could put into the Wards to get people to use them, but even then that would require the external taxes to be high enough to warrant the pain of using the ward system in the first place. Which, at the end of the day, results in building several flaws into the game just so people are motivated to use a broken system based off a player-base reaction to perceived injustices of high taxation from a previous game. How is this possibly a good idea?

So this is the way I see the whole thing coming about: Game developers see large crowds of players start to accumulate outside one of the major towns to sell their goods. This is replicated across multiple servers. By unwritten rule, more players join in. Developers mistakenly translate this into a desire by players to have an open market system where they manually check bazaars. Developers implement new system into next title in the series and are then shocked when the majority of players do not approve. Developers try to fix broken system. Players who failed at making gil in XI defend broken system because they are afraid they still won't make money on an Auction House.

Seriously, I loved economics of FFXI, but I just don't have the time to wander through an endless sea of retainers. I guess I'm just getting old enough to realize that I have a lot better things to do with my time. An AH would allow me to spend less time looking for comparison pricing, materials, and listing finished products, and would give me more time to enjoy the game and find other places to park my character to provide convenience items at higher costs. As for now, I log in from time to time, but I always yearn for the better days of FFXI. I log out, I do something else, and I eventually come back to look. This has resulted in disappointment. I'm sure there are a lot more players out there just like me: watching, waiting, hoping...

You might say that the game doesn't need people like us, that it doesn't need an auction house or a fully functional economy. You might think you are happy with the system, but games like these don't last long if they remain free. And this game will remain free as long as it can if the players do not return, but eventually it will die. Then your broken system will be a disappointment simply because you'll no longer be able to enjoy it. In that respect, if you truly love the game, you should think about the things that can change that would bring the most people back. Truthfully, the auction house is one such change.

[Rentahamster]

I don't agree with you. Some server economies may have been different but that was the biggest part of my enjoyment from FFXI, the Auction House. I didn't have a single craft in the 90's and I loved making gil at each level range of my craft. I researched npc prices, AH prices from farmers, found the best deals, and leveled my craft with profit in mind. It was much more enjoyable than the current level-as-crafter system that FFXIV has since the market ward system is a complete joke. . . .

Well said.