Why do you want an Auction House? (discussion)[dev1019]

[Wild]

Market Wards = Fail, they have attempted to correct the major problems with them and they have failed. Sorry, they reinvented the wheel and it won't move the game forward. Having an Auction House is core to any MMO, it cannot be replaced by a market ward system as SE has realized. They have only temporarily put a band aid on the market wards to buy themselves time to create an AH system. It will most likely be launched with a mail system which is also sitting on a huge pile of FAIL at this point.

[Kaedan]

Oh please, gimmie a break. Item price is as high as much youre willing to pay for it. You can do same things in MW. If there is no supply at the moment you can put it on sale for price 2-3 times higher than its usual price and potential buyer will pay that much now even knowing its overpriced. Next person selling this item will set price close to yours and you got inflation. If there are 10 sellers price will probably drop a bit. Its a free market. Demand > Supply - prices go up, Supply > Demand - priced go down. And you can always buy cheap ones and put it on sale for your price. Dont need AH for price speculating.
Yeah, and Ul'dah MW will handle 95% of worlds supply.

Wrong.

One of the big problems with AHs in general is the ability to buy up the entire supply of something. Someone can abuse and exploit the system by buying up every instance of an item (particularly rarer items) and then reposting them at 10x the price. This is exploitation... not free market.

In a real free market, that doesn't happen unless you have a monopoly (which is illegal btw...translated to gamespeak = exploit).

And the reason it works is because people can buy gil online, and if they really want that item, they will buy gil to get it... ruining the economy for the rest of us.

Now, I agree that it is certainly possible to do that with the current MW as well, but it's much more time consuming and is a hassle for the would-be exploiters. It's a deterrent. And honestly, I would rather spend a little extra time to reduce the chances of people exploiting and artificially manipulating the supply.

[Kaedan]

Market Wards = Fail, they have attempted to correct the major problems with them and they have failed. Sorry, they reinvented the wheel and it won't move the game forward. Having an Auction House is core to any MMO, it cannot be replaced by a market ward system as SE has realized. They have only temporarily put a band aid on the market wards to buy themselves time to create an AH system. It will most likely be launched with a mail system which is also sitting on a huge pile of FAIL at this point.

You obviously haven't played since they improved it. Market wards do everything an AH does now... minus many of the negatives. Of course, with the simple exception of having to spend a few seconds moving your character to the ward the item is in.

[TheCastle]

I need to point this out too many people here who don't seem to understand what the topic is really about.

The problem is not that the market ward is a fundamentally different system from an auction house. People are complaining that both systems are fundamentally identical in nature but the market ward is simply an inferior implementation of an auction house.

Both systems are auction houses.
Both systems are central locations where people buy and sell items.
The reason for a Central location is for convenience.
The core driving principle is convenience.

Inconvenient design does not compliment the core driving principle behind the reason to add an auction house at all.

Summary: The best solution is to make the current system as convenient as possible regardless of what you want to call it.

[Ciden]

I am bothered by all the mystical disjointing porting you have to do all the time between wards then screen blackout=disengaging playtime. They need to make the world whole again and need to at least rethink how items can be sold with ease and being efficient on time unloading stockpiles. If it's anything FFxiv got right, it's shades of gray. Maybe they can blend the two. Imagine what wards would look like if this game was very popular??! A sea of mannequins!
Here's what will make it real. Live bidding on rare items and bidding alerts from retainer via LS. Retainer Item Search Function. The ability to sell LOTS of items. Ward Specific Auctioneers selling only items of that ward's kind.
From what I gather, all the people here who played XI seem to have a healthy fear of the AH system spiraling out of control with hoarding and inflation again in xiv. (I played briefly. can't really comment on it.. got it the same time around xiv)
And I hate when I am looking for an item and I misread or forgot what ward the Retainer is in. Does that happen to any of you?

[Ciden]

Wrong.

One of the big problems with AHs in general is the ability to buy up the entire supply of something. Someone can abuse and exploit the system by buying up every instance of an item (particularly rarer items) and then reposting them at 10x the price. This is exploitation... not free market.

In a real free market, that doesn't happen unless you have a monopoly (which is illegal btw...translated to gamespeak = exploit).

And the reason it works is because people can buy gil online, and if they really want that item, they will buy gil to get it... ruining the economy for the rest of us.

Now, I agree that it is certainly possible to do that with the current MW as well, but it's much more time consuming and is a hassle for the would-be exploiters. It's a deterrent. And honestly, I would rather spend a little extra time to reduce the chances of people exploiting and artificially manipulating the supply.

How is that any different or going to stop me from buying up all the growth formula alphas in Gridania? Anything can be exploited. Have you ever seen a successful economic structure in place anywhere in the world working for anyone?! The whole thing works off of exploitation. Undercutting. Outsourcing. Fly by night trading. The list goes on an on.
Corruption is the norm. The only thing we're asking for is a way to sell our piles of crap and still have lots of time leftover to smash face in the game. Not the mythical golden System that will be failproof and completely fair to EVERYONE!

[Kimowar]

I didnt play 11 long enough to speculate but just seeing a trend here..... did something really bad happen to the ah on 11? people do seem to have this un-natural fear of them putting in an ah, look whats really gonna happen if someone trys to buy up item x? the sellers are gonna rush out to get more to replace item x, so the guy trying to manipulate the ah isnt gonna have control long, and this is something easier accomplished with marketwards, with no price history search and all, people need to quit being so afraid of change if they really want the game "fixed", also theres always gonna be the idiot that buys gil for rmt, the economy is actually more ran by the devs then people know, extra drops of this,less of that etc.

[Ciden]

I need to point this out too many people here who don't seem to understand what the topic is really about.

The problem is not that the market ward is a fundamentally different system from an auction house. People are complaining that both systems are fundamentally identical in nature but the market ward is simply an inferior implementation of an auction house.

Both systems are auction houses.
Both systems are central locations where people buy and sell items.
The reason for a Central location is for convenience.
The core driving principle is convenience.

Inconvenient design does not compliment the core driving principle behind the reason to add an auction house at all.

Summary: The best solution is to make the current system as convenient as possible regardless of what you want to call it.

Well said. I agree with your clarification completely. We need to be dreaming BIGGER! When has SE ever made the development of their game democratic?

[Corrderio]

It's amazing at the train of thought some people have. "AH is bad because of price history, don't add it!". I never seen anything about an AH would work exactly like XI's. They could easily take what works from the wards, add it to the AH, and then have the best of both.

[TheCastle]

I didnt play 11 long enough to speculate but just seeing a trend here..... did something really bad happen to the ah on 11? people do seem to have this un-natural fear of them putting in an ah, look whats really gonna happen if someone trys to buy up item x? the sellers are gonna rush out to get more to replace item x, so the guy trying to manipulate the ah isnt gonna have control long, and this is something easier accomplished with marketwards, with no price history search and all, people need to quit being so afraid of change if they really want the game "fixed"

People are referring to a point in time when FFXI's economy experienced incredible inflation. The reason for the inflation was due to the ability to hack the client to use fishing skill to fish up golden beds and blank items that can be vendored for a large sums of gil in a very short time. The influx of fresh gil was incredible and prices for everything sky rocketed to a point of insanity. Most people did not know how to deal with the inflation and most people did not even know why it was happening so they blamed RMT taking advantage of the auction house.

SE solved the problem by targeting RMT directly and even at one point directly attacked fishing bots by placing high level goblins around fishing locations. The experience was extremely memorable and seems to have scared the population.

Once these tricks were resolved you had incredible deflation to follow and that meant everyone was once again dealing with "EVERYONE UNDERCUTS ME QQ!!" The process lasted years before things fully leveled out.

edit: to give an idea of how insane the inflation was. Most high ticket items like Kirin's Osede was SELLING for the maximum amount of gil you can carry on one character. People were able to fund dynamis runs by farming spider webs for a couple hours a night. Scorpion harness for 40,000,000 gil!