My Dream of an Improved Market Ward System (No AH necessary)

[Denmo]

Yes, they came up with the auction house, first.

Link? I'm googling it all over and can't find any wiki or article saying XI did it first.

And yes, your idea is just more coats of paint (no offense). The problems with the Market Wards are that they aren't an auction house with no need to set up and use NPC vendors whatsoever. So rather than slowly morphing it into an AH (which is a silly idea), why not simply create an auction house properly from the ground up?

Besides, the market wards can stay. It has some use as an offline bazaar for those who really want such a thing. It just can't ever be anything that approaches the functionality of an auction house without fundamentally being turned into one.

The problem with market wards is that they aren't Auction houses? What kind of argument is that?

My solution would be dressing them up like AH's, yes. It would also find an easy solution for SE, one that's cost effective and doesn't require them to rewrite the system from the ground up. They would only have to redo the instanced areas and add housing, which they already planned on doing eventually. The only inconvenience to you would be hiring a retainer still. Can you tell me what other inconvenience my idea would be vs what an AH could do?

FFXI had all of its AH's linked in an update about 2-3 months ago, sharing all the market wards in 1 area would be helpful to everyone, mainly people wouldn't need to go to ul'dah to buy stuff

I suppose with my system you could also have your retainer set to have access to the markets of other city states, like say your retainer's well-traveled. That way someone in Gridania could call up the retainer of someone from Uldah, or whatever, and the markets would be linked simply by retainers on an individual basis.

If I could draw a picture of this I would lol.