Quote Originally Posted by Wolfie View Post
Any developer (or game critic) worth their salt would have realized a long time ago that there are major, fundamental design flaws with Market Wards that cannot ever be fixed and will always make inferior.
I have been saying the same since day one. SE has done a good job of improving the experience by streamlining the browsing of bazaars and improving the speed at which the retainer models load, but at some point they will have to realize they're throwing good money after bad.

They have made it only seem less annoying by putting half an auction house in place and early-loading the starred retainers. If you want to look for a retainer by name (maybe you want to buy multiple items from the same ward without all the trips back and forth to the make-believe "search" counter) you will see it is extremely frustrating and nigh impossible, just like before the search-and-flag system. The game can still show only those retainers immediately around you. Even 1-2 steps forward will reveal many retainers previously invisible, while those close behind you quickly disappear.

This market ward system strains at the current server populations and would never scale to the number of players in a successful game. Sure SE could eventually add more servers, but surely there's a limit. I shudder to imagine 5 times the number of servers we have now, each feeling just as desolate.

Quote Originally Posted by Wolfie View Post
The few people that are still active on FFXIV just like plugging their ears and pretending like everything's perfect.
I don't think I would have said it so harshly, but I cannot disagree with the sentiment. Even I have become a cheerleader for SE at the incremental changes and improvements. ("Yes! We got backstory and quests!!") I think that's just human nature, to be hopeful and supportive. However I hope SE understands this and realizes that "better than it was" can still be "not acceptable to modern MMO gamers".