Are limited retainers hurting the market for new players?

[JackHatchet]

I started up on Gilgamesh, because it's a bigger server. Bigger servers should mean more traffic right? Anyways, this note is just to explain that I'm not on a dead server.

So while I was leveling up my crafted I ended up with a lot of low-mid level items. Armors, weapons, ect in the 5-40 range. Often I would notice that many items would not have any competition. Which is good for selling, because no competition. However, as I leveled up my crafts, and became more pressed for retainer space I realized why those items are few and far between.

While it would be easy to sell a level 15 item for 2,000 gil, because of no competition, it's hard to justify wasting a retainer sell slot for a 2,000 gil item when you could be selling another item for 10,000+.

As someone who loves working with FFXIV's crafting system I find it incredibly hard to market to the lower levels, because I have to make a choice between selling to them, or selling more profitable items. Ultimately, I pick selling a more profitable item. I imagine many other crafters probably do this as well. If you can sell a 10,000 gil item you most likely won't bother crafting and selling a 2,000 gil item.

A lot of this forced decision making is based on the limitations on retainers. Ultimately this hurts new players, and those leveling up low level classes, because those items aren't available to them easily on the market board.

Sure people can say "make it yourself," or "have a friend craft it," or even "don't buy gear off the market board, because it's expensive," but really... what kind of message is that sending? New adventures are the most impressionable players in an MMO. They're the last group you want to be telling to suck it up, because they'll be the first to leave if the game isn't as accessible, or the player base are a bunch of hard-assed jerks.

If there was ever a reason to allow people to sell more items on the market boards I believe this would be it. There's no denying that low level HQ items are profitable to make, but yet so many options remain empty. And while it is true that sellers lose out on some sales, the real victim here is the low-level new adventurer who misses an opportunity to get a shiny new sword, because no one would craft one.

[Risvertasashi]

The whole system is bad and limited. Yep, there should be a lot more sell slots, ability to buy partial stacks, etc etc.

Another thing that really helps is being able to list "buy orders". This is basically the opposite of a sell listing: "I'm willing to purchase 5 widgets for 5000 gil". That way even if no one is selling, crafters et al can look at that and see if it's worth their time to make said widgets for the buyer.

The result of what we have now: Markets with a low number of participants pulling from already small server populations (yes, even big servers are tiny in market terms), and prices fluctuate wildly.

[Underlord]

I agree. As a omnicrafter and even with 5 retainers, my fc members laugh sometimes cause I wont even post anything on mb that usually sells less then 15-20k. If im farming mats, and crafting items consistently that sell for 60k-200k... why would I waste the slot for anything below 15-20k. I want the most bang for the buck, sort of speaking. And then my fc wonders why I make between 1-2mil a day selling on mb...

[Zojha]

To be honest, I'm not sure new players would really benefit much from this.

It's not just a space constraint after all, it's also a time constraint. Why would you farm up the mats for something that sells less in the first place if you can get something that sells for more? That's just less money per time. So why would low level gear supply increase? Only way I can see is if crafters get low level mats delivered for free or the prices for higher level stuff goes down enough to make farming the mats more profitable.

But you realize how much they would have to drop, right? A fresh lvl 50 will have 500-700k tops, if he didn't buy anything and cut corners. Even going to the vendor for gear hurts a little and those items still are three times cheaper than on the MB unless they come en masse via quests or random drops, in which case they are usually sold by people who just want to get rid of the excess stuff for "any" price.

So, no, I don't think limited retainers hurt newbies in any way. Even if people had unlimited space to sell and time to farm, people would rather go for the most profitable items if they sell to make a profit. And those simply aren't items that cater to people with very limited budgets.

[Dante_V]

To be honest, I'm not sure new players would really benefit much from this.

It's not just a space constraint after all, it's also a time constraint. Why would you farm up the mats for something that sells less in the first place if you can get something that sells for more? That's just less money per time. So why would low level gear supply increase? Only way I can see is if crafters get low level mats delivered for free or the prices for higher level stuff goes down enough to make farming the mats more profitable.



So, no, I don't think limited retainers hurt newbies in any way. Even if people had unlimited space to sell and time to farm, people would rather go for the most profitable items if they sell to make a profit. And those simply aren't items that cater to people with very limited budgets.

Agree 100%. It has absolutely nothing to do with new players at all. The person benefiting would be the person posting.

[Zojha]

Agree 100%. It has absolutely nothing to do with new players at all. The person benefiting would be the person posting.

Well, technically anyone who wants to sell more than they currently can at a given time would benefit. Those typically aren't new players either, though. That's me when I sift out my junk after months because I need glamour space again :3

Just kidding.

After reading that undercutting thread, I would wager that even if prices actually became so low that a newbie would buy without regret, chances are someone rich would buy the items before them instead and resell at a higher price. After all, they're still being bought at that price, just not by newbies but rather established players who simply don't care about "peanuts" anymore.

As it is, doing so creates an opportunity cost. Sure, you can buy up all items below a certain price point and resell, but that requires space (both inventory and listing), which you could use for more profitable things, so the practice is limited. Without that restriction, you can do it freely and there's no reason why you shouldn't.

[JackHatchet]

I don't know about you guys, but when I was leveling up crafting classes I was vendoring items left and right. I also vendored a lot of items filling up my completion log. So items like that will still be produced regardless. However, they might not make it to the market if there's no slots to list them under.

I can't tell you how many times I tried leveling a new combat class just to scroll up to the market board and see no items listed for what I want to buy. Maybe new players wouldn't want to spend 5,000-,10,000 on a HQ level 10 item, but maybe if there were more listed than zero the price might drop a bit, and make it seem like a reasonable purchase for a new player.

[DPZ2]

Almost all of the low-level crafted pieces are available from vendors in the leveling areas. If you're not making HQ gear to sell from levels 1 through 30 (or even 40), why bother, as the materials alone may be worth more than the low-price you'd have to sell at on the Market Board to match vendor pricing.

[MN_14]

Having only 2 retainers does limit the amount of items that I can put up on the market board, but to be honest, I'm not entirely sure whether more space will actually increase the number of low level crafted items up on the market. When I first started ARR, I put up a ton of mid-level items since I couldn't craft anything better at the time. This was also during a boom of new players, so sales were predictable and I could earn a decent amount simply by supplying the market with leve quest items and crafting quest items, as well as some mid level DoH/DoL gear (without even having to check prices).

Naturally, the market began to fizzle out after a month and to this day, there is very little demand for these items compared to higher level items. My server happens to be one of the smaller ones, so this might not necessarily be the case on other servers, however.

No matter how many slots a retainer has, a crafter will still be limited by the number of items that they can craft in a day. There are a ton of items that have greater demand than these low level items, and if my two retainers happened to have twice the number of available slots, I'd simply fill them up with those instead.

[Nicobo]

...Are limited retainers hurting the market for new players?...

IMO it is helping new players but not hurting, as low level craftings become profitable due to this limitation.