Market Wards, enough is enough

[ArkhamNative]

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.

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".

[Wolfie]

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.



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".

I know it's harsh, but every time someone comes out with a good point against MW (and trust me, there are LOTS), dozens of people jump down his/her throat about how MW is perfect or better than AH or whatever. It gets tiring trying to explain to people why something doesn't work, only to not be heard and for them to just keep spouting the same stuff I refuted.

To expand on what you said, the following will never be possible in Market Wards, as long as SE insists that that there be physical NPCs selling your stuff in separate zones:

Retainers selling multiple categories of items without a penalty
Excessive zoning when buying multiple items
Excessive time spent performing searches and browsing
Inability to render a lot of shops (also places a big strain on weaker gaming machines)
Ward limits (and if the game ever gets more than 2000 players per server, this is going to be HUGE)
Limited sale slots and retainers (also problem combined with point #1)

Really, there is nothing that MW does now that can't be made better, faster, and cheaper (in terms of developer costs) by removing the NPCs and making everything happen from a windowed interface like FFXI/WOW/Aion/[your MMO of choice].