Market Ward concept has failed

[Monkeysnarf]

The market ward would be just fine if you could actually avoid wasting time and lag and buy and sell stuff from the item look-up counter...

[glassalice]

I also like and occasionally dislike the market wards. I think it has pros and cons and personally I would keep them. Everyone complaining about how 'time consuming' it is to find items - I just don't understand you, I'm sorry. How often do you go looking for more than a handful of things at a time anyway? I outfitted 3 of my classes with all the new gear I could find yesterday and it took me maybe 30 minutes tops. Plus... and here is what I love most about the Market... I got to SEE what I was buying before I bought it. I mean sure, some things everyone has and you know what it looks like - but more unique or new gear... I want to see it before I buy it, and I love that about the retainer system.

Only complaints I have really are (1) I want to be able to see HQd items identified without having to rely on ppl knowing to end the price with 1/2/3 and (2) it kills me how centralized it is with everyone in Ul'Dah and hardly anyone in Grid or LL - b/c it's a pain in the butt when you're crafting in Grid and you can't even find basic mats in the market there.

[Galka75]

Just put a time limit for retainer i. Markes place. So all can be able to put his retainer in his porpers wards.

The system is ok. Just need fix this issue.

Btw. It will be great if all retainer have the same armor please. So if i see a retainer whit any armor i will know is an armor for selling. Not he retainer clohes.

[Rinsui]

Just let the wards die already.
Stumbling through a bunch of twitching zombies isn't fun.

[GhostInfinity]

If they're so hell bent on making this work why not make retainers like a bazaar you can leave behind when you log off? (as opposed to the ffxi method of leaving your character logged in) Give retainers a tax break and have it compete with an implemented legtimate auction house. I'm just firing off ideas, if someone sat and really spent some time I'm sure they could come up with anything better than what's in 14 atm.

It's just a shame to have such a high level of detail in crafting and gathered/farmed/crafted mats only to have such a hap hazard way to sell things. A fixed AH and mail system alone would bring players back imo.

[Rentahamster]

Quote snipped. The direct answer to this, I fear, is that SE's original plans was to motivate people into adding $1 per retainer per running subscription.

Which is kinda odd considering that most people would buy more retainers just for the extra inventory space, even if we did have an AH-like system.

[viperld]

Wards are an interesting idea. In practice however you can't honestly say it's more (or even as) efficient as an AH. You can like it more (you can like anything) but to say it's as efficient is just a lie.

Not being able to view every retainer in a ward due to rendering lag is not acceptable. How is this acceptable. It's not. In FFXI you had the AH and then your gates outside of Juno. AH was the goto get-it-done place to be. How much should I sell this thing for? Let me check out AH history. When you wanted to see some cool bazaar stuff you'd actually commit to walking around the Juno gates and examine 50+ or so players to see what they had. Oh neat, that person is selling that armor for max gil. Oh wow, I didn't know you could get that material for so cheap. There was the AH and Bazaars, both. Both are necessary, neither is sufficient by itself. If XI only had Bazaar lol that would have been awful (lol sooo bad).

Let there be 2 supermarkets in your town: 1 that had everything organized (and nothing was invisible due to lag lol) for quick grabbing, and another with nothing in order. Any busy person is going to the ordered market regularly, and maybe the disordered one on the weekends and days off from work/school. Some people will make the time to go to the disordered one just because.

So yea. If they add a straight AH then MW won't be a pain anymore because it will be optional. I can think of 2 mmo's off the top of my head that have both and buying/selling is easy breezy. Anyone saying "but this isn't 11" is really saying "I want something completely different from 11 just because". If having an AH makes a mmo FF11 then there's tons of FF11 clones out there with no chocobo's or Redmages.

[Ivy]

As a botanist, the Market Wards need tweaking. For one, listing the prices that other retainers are selling items for is not helpful for the seller (though it's wonderful for the buyers). The FFXI system of showing the last couple of sell prices is a much better system because 1) it tells the seller how often the item actually sells and 2) it limits crazy undercutting.

When I go to sell something, I see how many other retainers are selling the same item and for how much. I don't know if that item is actually in demand or not. Botanists get a lot of random stuff, so I have no way to prioritize my time. Should I bother putting that Eagle feather on my retainer, or should I just NPC it? Also, the selling price for Eagle feathers range from 5000 gill to 100 gill. There is no way to keep a price stable. In FFXI, a buyer would look at the last few selling prices and shoot for that range. That system helped to minimize undercutting. Now, it's easy peezy and running rampant. Soon, all items will be sold for 5 gil above NPC price.

I also liked the 7 item limit for the FFXI auction house. While putting Mistletoe onto my retainer, someone else was selling 56 of them. Should I even bother with my measly 2? I guess I could put them on for 100 gill less and try to undercut, but that's only good until someone else undercuts me, which is easy to do in this current system. If we limit the number of items to sell to a small number, people will be selective about what they put up for sell and we won't have hundreds of the same item up for sale.

Buying from the Market Wards is fine. I don't mind it at all, but selling things is awful.

[grausekopf]

I am kinda tired of this topic after all these months but still feel the urge to let SE know within these topics that they should finally implement the AH. I am all up for new approaches and ideas concerning such systems but I don't see the market wards ever working as easy and efficient as an auction house.

[BlaiseLallaise]

If they're so hell bent on making this work why not make retainers like a bazaar you can leave behind when you log off? (as opposed to the ffxi method of leaving your character logged in)...

You do realize that's how it has been since the beginning...right? That is, of course, disregarding the early ward crashes and all.