Player Poll: What Specifically is it you want from an "Auction House"

[Cairdeas]

Option 1. FFXIV's economy set up (player-run shops) is good and workable, but because of having to graphically render every shop, it's inconvenient and limited. When/if SE decides to switch to a menu/window interface only, with no retainers and zones and whatever, then it'll be a great system.

I like the idea of mixing the Retainers and Menus together.


Player has a Retainer. They give their items to the retainer to sell.

Player goes to Market Window. Searches for item.
Finds item in item list, shows retainers selling the item and for what price.
Open the retainer, the item is marked, buy the item, window shop the rest of the retainers good.
Log out of the window.

[Wolfie]

I like the idea of mixing the Retainers and Menus together.


Player has a Retainer. They give their items to the retainer to sell.

Player goes to Market Window. Searches for item.
Finds item in item list, shows retainers selling the item and for what price.
Open the retainer, the item is marked, buy the item, window shop the rest of the retainers good.
Log out of the window.

They can even make your retainer "go away" and become unusable after you tell it go set up shop.

But practically every issue with MW right now stems from having a bunch of retainer zombies in a ward dungeon. Hardware is extremely limited in the amount of NPCs and PCs that can be in a zone and/or in such a small area. If the servers don't have to store and process the graphics info associated with retainers, it would be awesome.

[Corrderio]

Option 1. FFXIV's economy set up (player-run shops) is good and workable, but because of having to graphically render every shop, it's inconvenient and limited. When/if SE decides to switch to a menu/window interface only, with no retainers and zones and whatever, then it'll be a great system.

This, 1000 times this. Keep the menu/price listings from the wards. Get rid of zones/retainers and have it menu based like the AH, then it'd be perfect.

[Cairdeas]

They can even make your retainer "go away" and become unusable after you tell it go set up shop.

But practically every issue with MW right now stems from having a bunch of retainer zombies in a ward dungeon. Hardware is extremely limited in the amount of NPCs and PCs that can be in a zone and/or in such a small area. If the servers don't have to store and process the graphics info associated with retainers, it would be awesome.

Basically turn the marketwards into something thats not rendered and we just visit a window

But every purchase still makes you visit that retainers entire inventory before you can purchase the individual item. So the window shopping from the physical wards is still present.

[Zantetsuken]

My preference would be a Search and Delivery counter for the MW. Basically you pay a premium to have the item delivered directly to you and the Search counter could get items from other cities for an additional fee. This fix would quickly solve 99% of the complaints about the Market Wards.

I might temper the convenience of buying between cities by tethering it to an ongoing mission system where players undergo special leves in order to keep trade routes open between cities. It's not really a new idea, in fact FFXI had something similar to this with the region-controlled NPC shops.

After that, SE needs to add a REAL auction house along the lines of FFVI and FFIX -- A place where you can put rare and special items up for real-time bidding by players and perhaps even NPCs. Not only that but the system could have items that are randomly added to the mix as well so you never know what might show up for auction~

[Rizon]

Heres the backside of the argument then. The only feature that is technically unique to a Auction House are Blind and Timed Bidding. When someone says they do not want an Auction House they really do mean they do not want Timed or Blind Bidding.

This whole thing is a problem with Nomenclature. If all the features besides a Timed or Blind Bidding were implemented it still wouldn't be an auction house and all those features can be implemented into the market ward.

If by Timed or Blind bidding you mean that I have only 5 days to sell my item before it is returned to me then you are correct. I want no parts of it. I would rather be taxed by selling something and not for putting it on sale everytime. I do not know how much Gil I have lost because the manipulators forced me to resell things over and over again

[Cairdeas]

If by Timed or Blind bidding you mean that I have only 5 days to sell my item before it is returned to me then you are correct. I want no parts of it. I would rather be taxed by selling something and not for putting it on sale everytime. I do not know how much Gil I have lost because the manipulators forced me to resell things over and over again

"Timed Bidding" is when you put an item up for 5 gold and set it to stay up for 7 days and then people bid more and more for it till the 7 days is up.

[Molly_Millions]

We don't need an AH imo, it's a waste of dev resources.

[Wolfie]

I would argue that more dev time is wasted on maintaining and trying to improve a needlessly complex system.

[Rentahamster]

We don't need an AH imo, it's a waste of dev resources.

Trying to fix the market wards, which involves fixes to the server hardware, server software, graphics engine, and overall programming code optimization, is an even bigger waste of dev resources.

cost/benefit analysis (can I have it?)