Market Wards, enough is enough

[sketch]

The problem is unfixable. However you look at it, a sea of 100s of retainers in one place is never going to be a viable system.

i agree and the game would need to be @ 100% for the ps3 release to be effective

[Quisi]

People in favor of wards probably would like the game to asks us every time we use an ability: Are you sure you want to use it? yes no. After all 1 more step to do something isn't a big deal, right?

[Aztecguy82]

If you think about it Wards is just an AH without history. As long as they don't add history i don't care if they use wards or AH. If they has a preview window of how an item would look on your character(like on Aion), i would prefer AH no history.

[Wolfie]

Any developer (or game critic) worth their salt would have realized a long time ago that there are major, fundamental design flaws with Market Wards that cannot ever be fixed and will always make inferior. The few people that are still active on FFXIV just like plugging their ears and pretending like everything's perfect.

[Elexia]

The few people that are still active on FFXIV just like plugging their ears and pretending like everything's perfect.

I've yet to see someone say this game is perfect. Why exaggerate?

[Moth]

I don't have a problem with the wards, they just need to keep them from crashing.

[TheVedis]

Ok i just gotta state something

people didnt quit in mass because of no AH
they didnt quit in mass cuz they couldnt jump

The main killers at launch were the following

1) massive UI lag
2) combat system that coulda been alot better
3) lack of content

those are the main 3 things that matter, not silly things like "i cant jump down a cliff wah wah wah"


as for the wards right now, they are fine as is, but could ALWAYS use more improvement, and alot of those improvements are obviousnt and dont need restating

the recent crashing has gotten worse due to the fix they put in for the retainers reseting(which was in turn a minor crash bug before thats gotten worse cuz of it)
this is due to mmo coding, all mmos have this problem when they put certain fixes in, sometimes it shows up worse then others
i 99% expect something in tomorows patch addressing it

[Delsus]

No I want SE to bring retainers to the streets and then I want them to fix whatever lag it causes.

Earn their pay. Do what they get paid for. Fix the bugs. Fix the lag.

SE have no control over what would happen when your PC has to calculate and draw 200% more charecter models than now, any lag from brining retainers to the streets would be entirely based on a players PC and connection, unless you want the game offline while they downgrade the graphics to fix this client side lag.

Back on topic, the wards do badly need stabalising, however its not always as simple a job as you all seem to think, it requires more configurations, maybe new hardware for the servers, also it may not be the servers, they could need more beefy infrasructure equipment to the servers that contain the wards. What they need to do is buy a completly new set of equipment they have, build an exact replica of thier setup (isolated from the current network) and copy the configurations over, then they need to stress test each piece of hardware indevidually then they find the bottle neck and can start to find the issue, then they would beable to optimise the neccecery configurations or upgrade hardware.

All of this takes time, take psn, that was offline for 1 month to only upgrade thier security while thier network was offline, all they needed to do was test on the current network, then change configurations and upgrade firewalls and everything else. Of course all of this is speculation but it is what I would do if I was in this situation, also what needs to be taken into account is the amount of staff they put to rebuilding the game because of the bad rep.

Also lets not forget there is still no certainty over the wards because of the amount of people that want an AH, if they spend over 100k on testing and upgrading the hardware for the wards then decide to ditch them it would be a complete waste of money.

So I would say the main reason they havent been stabalised yet is the demand for an AH and the uncertanty over the future of the wards. Until it can be shown that any money spent on the servers that handle the wards can be justified the stability will not change much unless its a simple configuration change which I highly doubt because it would be fixed now.

A way to fix the issue (but it would cost alot of money is to use differant servers for each ward, then when you search the client is programed to send a multicast to all of the ward servers, this would hugely increase capacity and more retainers could be put in them (if the wards get enlarged) the downside is they need to be certain they will be keeping the wards because it would cost over $300k

[Dimo]

For me, I feel like buying from the market wards isn't terrible (yes its not as quick/easy as an auction house, but im not ripping my hair out over it). What kills it for me is selling stuff on there. That is the real problem/hassle. Basically you have to:

1.Choose the item you want to sell from your retainer
2.Exit that menu and go to the search function
3.Figure out what category the item even falls under
4.Look at the prices of the item
5.Exit those menus and go back to retainer
6.Put the item up for sale

Now with a good UI based auction house they could reduce that many steps way down. Type in the item in a search function, check prices, put the item up for sale, done. Right now theres just way to many menus to go through just to sell 1 item, and with the UI lag, its really a hassle.

[ArkhamNative]

Any developer (or game critic) worth their salt would have realized a long time ago that there are major, fundamental design flaws with Market Wards that cannot ever be fixed and will always make inferior.

I have been saying the same since day one. SE has done a good job of improving the experience by streamlining the browsing of bazaars and improving the speed at which the retainer models load, but at some point they will have to realize they're throwing good money after bad.

They have made it only seem less annoying by putting half an auction house in place and early-loading the starred retainers. If you want to look for a retainer by name (maybe you want to buy multiple items from the same ward without all the trips back and forth to the make-believe "search" counter) you will see it is extremely frustrating and nigh impossible, just like before the search-and-flag system. The game can still show only those retainers immediately around you. Even 1-2 steps forward will reveal many retainers previously invisible, while those close behind you quickly disappear.

This market ward system strains at the current server populations and would never scale to the number of players in a successful game. Sure SE could eventually add more servers, but surely there's a limit. I shudder to imagine 5 times the number of servers we have now, each feeling just as desolate.

The few people that are still active on FFXIV just like plugging their ears and pretending like everything's perfect.

I don't think I would have said it so harshly, but I cannot disagree with the sentiment. Even I have become a cheerleader for SE at the incremental changes and improvements. ("Yes! We got backstory and quests!!") I think that's just human nature, to be hopeful and supportive. However I hope SE understands this and realizes that "better than it was" can still be "not acceptable to modern MMO gamers".