Market Ward Revamp Blueprint

[Dreamer]

~*~ Market Ward Revamp Blueprint ~*~

Like many others, I’ve been rather frustrated by the amount of back and forth that we see by the pro-Market Ward and pro-Auction House advocates here on the forums. The market wards obviously have some (correctable)flaws in their current state, but many wish to see them abolished and a WoW/Aion or FFXI-style AH added in their place.

I think we can do better than that, so here is my proposal for a revamp to the current Market Ward system that will hopefully make all parties involved happy. I know you’re probably thinking “By the Twelve, not another thread on MWs versus AH.” I mirror that sentiment, actually. But I hope this can be a thread that offers solutions, instead of back and forth bickering on the nature of each system.

I realize that this looks like a massive wall of text, but I promise that I have been as concise as I possibly can while trying to create a full blueprint to revamp the system. Please take the time to read it in its entirety if you can, as I feel the system as proposed here has quite a bit of potential.


I. Market Ward Structure

There are three primary problems with the current market ward structure.

The first is and largest is that due to the progression of the game’s storyline, everyone inevitably ends up in Ul’dah. In addition, many of the best leves for many classes are found in Ul’dah. Because of this, the Ul’dan wards are packed to capacity while the Gridanian and Limsan wards are virtually ghost towns.

The second is that due to the way the game has structured the market wards, the stalls are mostly empty, while people must wade through a literal sea of retainers to find the one you want.

Third, due to the aforementioned issues, the wards crash frequently. This is an aggravation to both buyers and sellers.

Solution:
1. Retainer Stall Mandate: No retainers are allowed on the market ward floor; all retainers must be stationed in a stall. To facilitate this, the stall leasing fee will be removed, and the lease duration increased to 48 hours (based on when it was leased, not server time like leves)

Optional: The stall lease is not renewable – this is to prevent ‘stall squatting.’ Optional because I’m not sure if this is needed when combined with the additional changes listed below.

2. Ward Sharding: To facilitate the changes in part one, two structural changes must be made.

First, to allow for the increased usage of stalls, the current ward layout will be increased threefold in size for a total of 30 stalls per ward. The resulting layout would be something like this:

[]=[]=[]
||=||=||
[]=[]=[]

The above placement would have five retainers in stalls at each bracket. Just imagine three of the current ward layouts side by side, connected by a tunnel at the north doors, south doors, and center.

Second, new shards will spawn for more retainers as follows: once a ward type at a given city-state fills to capacity, a new shard will not be created until the other two wards are both at least 70% full (this is inclusive of all shards). When a given shard is full, its name will be highlighted in red.

For those unfamiliar with what I mean by sharding, it essentially means a new, clean copy of the instance is spawned in addition to the original. For example:
Tinkerer’s Ward I
Tinkerer’s Ward II
Tinkerer’s Ward III
Tinkerer’s Ward IV
<More added as needed according to the system outlined above>

Part 1 should help with the crashing problem market wards currently face (which is thought to be due to the sheer number of retainers being placed in a single ward), while at the same time making the retainers easier to navigate .Part 2 will serve a dual purpose of allowing multiple instances of each ward and promoting the usage of market wards other than Ul’dah.

I generally see at max around 80-90 retainers in a ward, so as the retainer population spreads out we’ll likely see no more than 2-3 shards of a given ward with the current population.


II. Market Ward Finances

Now that we’ve discussed structural concerns, I’ll move on to economic changes to the wards. The system as is very bland, and there’s no incentive to selling or buying anywhere other than Ul’dah at this point in time. Here is my proposal to change that (in addition to the Market Ward Structure solution).

Solution:

1. Tax Incentives: This system builds directly on the guild system already in place. In simple terms, each ward grants incentives for specific wares based on which city-state it is located in. These incentives are based on which guilds call that specific city-state home.

A flat rate of 20% is levied on goods not sponsored by a guild for that city-state, while guild-sponsored goods only require a 5% tax for their sale.

Optional: If we wanted to make our starting city-states have slightly more impact, we could have them lower the base tax from 20% to 16-18%. This is optional because I feel the overall impact would be negligible.

For example, let’s take Gridania. Gridanian guilds include the Botanist’s Guild, the Leatherworker’s Guild, and the Conjurer’s Guild. Therefore, items including lumber, feathers, leather equipment, staves/wands, bows/arrows and more would require only a 5% tax to sell at their wards. Meanwhile, items such as cloth armor, jewelry, arms/armor, and fish would all require a 20% fee to sell at Gridania.

Note that guild incentives apply to only DoH/DoL guilds, as DoW/DoM incentives would cause significant overlap. Therefore, even though the conjurer’s guild is located in Gridania, you would need to go to Ul’dah (where the weaver’s guild is located) for cloth armor/clothing, while you could still sell wands/staves at the reduced rate in Gridania due to the presence of the carpenter’s guild.

The purpose of this is to add further incentive to buy/sell in places other than Ul’dah by giving explicit incentive to do so. When combined with the structural changes, buyers and sellers will be more likely to migrate to Gridania for their lumber, Limsa for their heavy armors, Ul’dah for their jewelry, etc.


III. Market Ward UI

With so many changes, obviously some UI elements will need to be changed in order to facilitate the new system.

Solution:

1. Retainer Accessibility: Retainers are summonable regardless of whether or not they are currently occupied at market stalls.

2. Retainer Proliferation: An additional retainer bell will be installed in each city-state.

3a. Product Placement - 1: When selecting items to sell in your bazaar, those items that can be sold in this city-state at the reduced rate are highlighted in cyan.

3b. Product Placement - 2: When selecting items to sell in your bazaar, a second window showing the current prices for that particular item in your current city-state will be displayed as you select the price. This applies to both sales and repair requests.

3b. Product Searching: In addition to the current item category browsing, a fully functional search feature will be implemented. Search queries are sorted by price.

3c. Product Purchasing : When you select an item from either a search or a category listing, you are given three options: [Visit], [Deliver], and [Cancel].
[Visit]:The visit option teleports you to that ward, directly in front of that retainer’s stall with a star. You may then open the retainer’s bazaar and purchase the item. There is no additional fee for this purchase.
[Deliver]: The deliver option deposits the item from this retainer directly into your inventory. However, there is a 25% fee for use of this service.
[Cancel]: This option cancels the purchase.

4. Repair Promotion: A new search feature, [Repair Service] is available from the main ward menu. This option shows all the requested repairs in this city-state’s ward that you have sufficient rank to complete. Those repairs for which you have both the sufficient rank and sufficient materials to complete will be highlighted in cyan.

Optional: A portion of the proceeds for a delivery could be given directly to the retainer’s owner. However, I’m unsure as to whether or not this could be abused in some manner.

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Well, there you have it. I’m fairly certain this both corrects the current problems with the wards, and also adds missing functionality found in other systems that many have requested. However, there’s always room for improvement, so feel free to leave constructive responses below. Also, if you support this initiative, please /like it! With enough support from the players, perhaps SE will implement some of its ideas, which would be wonderful. Thank you for reading!

[Cutriss]

You're not really incentivizing people to place goods in the Gridania and LL wards by doing that. You're just adding to the cost of business. A failed sale is worth a lot less than a sale where you have to eat 15%-20% of the price.

Taxes were increased in Whitegate to motivate people to remove AFK bazaars from the city because Whitegate was already a point of congestion and there was an impact to server performance. Here, we can't use the game economy to fix the server performance issue because the design flaw means it can happen anywhere, and fixing the design flaw doesn't mitigate the fact that people will want to congregate their goods in the most visible location, not fragmented out.

That said, I applaud you for putting some critical thinking to it and going through the effort of writing up this post. It's very easy to criticize, it takes more effort to present cogent arguments and suggestions.

[Rentahamster]

Well, there you have it. I’m fairly certain this both corrects the current problems with the wards, and also adds missing functionality found in other systems that many have requested. [/COLOR]

This doesn't fix the main problem with the wards. The main problem with the wards is that it is an unstable mess due to the servers not being able to handle the load and the game engine not being able to handle all the NPCs at once.

Your suggestions, while admirable, are not going to fix the underlying server issues, no matter how many instances you spread the NPCs out.


"Market Ward Structure" - your suggestions here are to alleviate problems like,

"The second is that due to the way the game has structured the market wards, the stalls are mostly empty, while people must wade through a literal sea of retainers to find the one you want.

Third, due to the aforementioned issues, the wards crash frequently. This is an aggravation to both buyers and sellers."

Here's an easier solution - get rid of the NPCs for now until they optimize the server code.


"Market Ward Finances" - your suggestions here are to alleviate problems like:

The system as is very bland, and there’s no incentive to selling or buying anywhere other than Ul’dah at this point in time.

Everyone sells their stuff in Uldah - okay, so what do we do? You suggest a complex system of taxes. That is overly complicated and does not address the main reason people want to sell in Uldah only.

Here's an easier solution - merge the market wards of all 3 cities into one market ward, like what they did recently for Final Fantasy 11. No matter which city you're in, you'll always find lots of stuff to buy and sell.


"Market Ward UI" - your UI suggestions are needed due to your previous two sections of fixes.

Well, now that we've gotten rid of NPC retainers and merged the wards, we don't even really need most of the suggestions you have.


You only need to do two things and that alone would fix the majority of the problems. At a later date, when the server code is better optimized, they can reintroduce the NPC retainer system, and expand on it.

[tachikoma]

I agree with Mr. Hamster on all points, the problems with the system now are going to explode when PS3 launches. They need to do a few things as stated all over the forums:

1. remove the NPC's (buy from the search menu)
2. link the wards from all 3 cities
3. show HQ items in search results
4. simplify the search interface category structure

expanded:
1. I mean not to remove retainers, but just the process of buying items. I could see a similar graphical display like when using one of the bells where your target retainer pops on screen when you select it. This keeps the gear model display and retainer features currently while reducing lag immensely
2. obviously this helps reduce the dependency of players to always be in ul dah, its almost self fullfilling where you everyone goes to ul dah because leve's are best there, also wards are full, and increased player pop helps making groups -> they could make a better search feature, link the wards, and balance the leve's better and players would naturally spread out to the 3 cities more evenly.
3. obvious benefit to sellers and buyers, also speeds the process of buying goods and reduces lag/server load
4. This goes toward everyones sanity, its hard to find certain items and the current category and ward breakdown sucks. Just having a search feature is not enough ppl liked the AH's in FFXI because you could easily find what gear was both available and job specific quickly. I think for new players the following would do wonders for making them happy right away, ie letting them find what they want faster:
menu lvl 1-[item search "gear"] *new option below regular wards search
menu lvl 2-[slot=weapon,tool,hand,feet,head,body,ammo,ring,etc]
menu lvl 3-[class/job=LNC,GLA,ARC,MIN,LW,WVR,BOT,MIN,FISH]

*results should be rank sortable

Ward instability: If I had to guess as a full time database programmer the instability is due to the constant server checks going on at each step of the process, the easiest way to reduce server load while keeping the current system in place is to reduce the number of sql calls going back and forth to japan. If you instead did 1 sql call at the start of a retainer interaction to determine what goods the retainer had and for what price then let the interactions be 100% client side untill an item is purchased then the whole transaction is sent over and either you fail or succeed. Same goes for adding items to your retainer or retainers bazaar, you should not be doing sql calls for each item move, rather at the start and end.

[Amineri]

Hiya Chloe! Much as I enjoy reading your posts, I think I'll have to respectfully disagree with you here. (Also with the "OMG-insta-buy-it-now" crowd >.>)

Details below:

I. Market Ward Structure

There are three primary problems with the current market ward structure.

The first is and largest is that due to the progression of the game’s storyline, everyone inevitably ends up in Ul’dah. In addition, many of the best leves for many classes are found in Ul’dah. Because of this, the Ul’dan wards are packed to capacity while the Gridanian and Limsan wards are virtually ghost towns.

The second is that due to the way the game has structured the market wards, the stalls are mostly empty, while people must wade through a literal sea of retainers to find the one you want.

Third, due to the aforementioned issues, the wards crash frequently. This is an aggravation to both buyers and sellers.

The convergence of retainers into Ul'dah has far deeper roots then you describe above. In addition to the story-line and 'best leves' being in Ul'dah, there are a few other issues that make Ul'dah slightly better then the other cities in this regard. The placement of the core elements of the city is a big one. The Aetheryte crystal, markets, a shop, the Adventurer Guild, and repair NPC (for tier 1 facilities) are all in close proximity in Ul'dah. They are not that way in the other two cities. Further, the two rank 40 areas in Thanalan are nearly adjacent, while the two rank 40 areas in the other two areas are widely spread out.

More fundamentally, the question I've been asking myself is whether the game world can actually support three separate markets. Having multiple markets is inherently an unstable situation, I believe. Each seller wants the largest possible pool of buyers, and each buyer wants the largest possible pool of sellers, in order to optimize their price. Having multiple markets is like trying to balance a needle on its point. Once one market starts to having a bigger pool of buyers and sellers, other buyers and sellers will start to move to that market. Once that movement begins, it is self-reinforcing, to the point where we are today.

Now, why are there multiple markets in the real world? Cost barriers. That is, it costs money and time to move goods from one place to another. This is because the markets are physically separated, in sufficient amount to justify selling and buying in multiple places, because the cost associated with travelling to a single unified market outweigh the benefits.

In Eorzea, with the Aetheryte transportation system, there is almost zero cost to transportation. Particularly since entire parties can transport, and many players use tele-bots accounts to move themselves around, the costs are essentially negligible. In order to sustain multiple markets, real and actual costs (in terms of time) between markets would have to be added. That means abolishing the teleport system and having on the order of an hour's travel time between the markets. In addition, there would need to some form of economic draw AT those other markets in order to justify their continued existence.

In the real world, a distinct sub-market is formed when there is economic incentive at the geographic location. For example, the gold rush in the 1840s prompted people to go to California, which was geographically isolated from the east coast markets, thus prompting a new sub-market. The same in Alaska for the discovery of oil. For Gridania and Limsa Lominsa, that unique resources would have to be introduced there, to justify the creation of the market. When said resources aren't present, or aren't in demand, you end up with ghost towns -- just like in the real world.

Ultimately, I think the cost of separating the markets is too high. Even the run-time between the cities is only around 20 to 25 minutes, which isn't enough to justify multiple markets. The run-travel time would have to probably be doubled, and teleporting abolished in order to sustain other markets.

I personally very much like the idea of separated markets. However, Eorzea just can't sustain them. As has been mentioned, you can attempt to artificially enforce them, but the underlying mechanisms are against it, and I don't think they can be beat.

[Amineri]

The goal of a market (whether it is called 'market wards' or 'auction house') is to facilitate the inherent supply-demand equation inherent in a free market economy.

I'm going to use that as my premise.

Problem 1 - Economy is Stagnant
Ultimately, the current problems stem from temporary (hopefully) conditions. No new products (i.e. sellable / buyable items) have been introduced in months. In the real world the need for new products drives a lot of innovation. Additionally, the consumer base is shrinking, as subscribers leave. This is fairly easy to address, simply by adding new item content, and improving the game to attract new players (well, the last isn't easy, but doesn't require changes to the economy to fix, at least not directly).

Changing the market UI, or making items instantly purchasable will do nothing to make the economy less stagnant. In fact, making changes to try and counter this stagnation could very well lead to a worse situation later.

Problem 2 - Demand side of equation is lacking

Once the stagnation is addressed, the issue of non-representation of demand will show itself more so then now. Currently only sellers are represented in the market, since buying is so woefully inefficient compared to selling.

Not only does this hinder player exchanges and establishment of the free-market price directly, but it allows for manipulation. That is, by simply buying many goods, would-be manipulators can shift the apparent price-point for a good. There is no counterbalance on the demand side (i.e. buyers).

To fix this, buy orders have to be introduced. Fixing the seek item feature would be a first step. It needs to be competitive with selling items, as it is not currently. However, having a second search tab for seeking items vs selling items is not the solution.

Items sold and items sought should be displayed through the same search window. The current UI can show 20 lines of items. The most expensive 10 buy orders, and the cheapest 10 sell orders should be displayed, in price order. This is information that both buyers and sellers need to know. This is way the free market would establish a fair market price for an item. The gap between highest buy order and lowest sell order is the price volatility of that item.

People buying (assuming they actually want to buy) would tend to place buy orders above the current most expensive buy order, moving the buy orders upward. People selling would sell to the highest buy order, thus moving it down. Thus the buy orders go up and down based on supply and demand.

People selling (assuming they actually want to sell) would tend to place sell orders below the current cheapest sell order (i.e. undercutting), moving the sell orders downward. People buying would buy the lowest items sold, moving them up. Thus the sell orders go up and down based on supply and demand.

If the gap is too large, fewer sellers will be willing to use the "low" buy orders, and too few buyers will use the "high" sell orders. They will instead place new buy and sell orders, thus narrowing the gap until people view the difference between buy and sell orders as small enough to not justify the time/expense involved in placing an order.

If the gap is too small, people will not place orders, and will instead opt to buy from or sell to the existing orders, rather than using up a retainer slot to place a new buy or sell order.

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I espouse this because I believe that it gives a simple way for the system to determine market price, allows fairly efficient methods of finding a buyer or seller, and is resistant to market manipulation.

Let's suppose that some organization wishes to artificially inflate the price of an item. Since the price point of an item is determined by the margin between the buy orders and sell orders, only one option are possible. Retain a narrow gap between buy / sell, but move both to a higher level.

In order to retain a narrow gap, the manipulators would having to buy out all of the lower price sell orders, then saturate the system with both buy orders and sell orders at a higher price then the original sell orders. This means that the manipulators would have to both buy and sell the items and the inflated price. Since the manipulators cannot change the actual supply and demand of the item, and they are now both buying and selling above the market price, this would create a boom for those that produce the item, while at the same time the number willing to consume the high-price sell orders would drop off. Thus many people would be utilizing the manipulators buy orders (at a high price), and few people would be using the sell orders.

The manipulators then have a choice - to replenish the buy orders or not.

If they do not, the gap widens, new item producers list items at a lower sell price, and the manipulators are forced to purchase these items at the high price, or lose control of the market.

If they do, they must keep purchasing items via these buy orders at a high price.

In either case, the manipulator is forced to continue buying items at a high price -- either by continually replacing the buy orders, or taking undercutting sell orders out of the market. Some people will still pay the high price of the sell orders, but many will either use back-channel methods to acquire the items, so the manipulators will be purchasing far more items then they are selling, and the difference between their buy-price and sell-price will not be high.

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So, I know this is far too long, but here is the summary:
1) Address market stagnation by adding new items to the economy and increasing the player-base
2) Add/fix buy orders, and add buy orders to the same search window as sell orders. This gives players the ability to find / sell items, and severely limits market manipulation.

After these issues are addressed, then adjusting the markets with regard to the three city-states, and the 'convenience' factors of instant-buying and selling could be looked at.

[Cutriss]

Copypasta.

Remove most of the wards. Leave Tinkerer's, Battlecraft, Fieldcraft, Tradecraft, Mender's, and maybe another.
Allow browsing/purchasing directly from select locations in each city. Purchases can be sent either to a retainer or to delivery box.
Fix the searching, allow searching by slot, filter by rank/job/etc. Add a free-text item search. Support individual display of HQ items.
Save pricing history for all transactions and provide a UI way to view this pricing history when browsing or selling items.
Retainers selling items will now no longer need to be placed in a ward to sell items. Extra payment will be required to have them placed in the wards. Further "enhanced payment" required to rent/maintain stalls, and a minimum merchandise count.
Tie "seeking items" into the global /translate search (which presumably is in progress) so that retainers can purchase items without having to hold one in their inventory. When a retainer selling an item is re-added into the sales index, immediately check for outstanding offers and sell the item to the oldest request meeting the minimum requested price.
Retainers now give a linkpearl to all players to notify of transactions. Each retainer can be configured to have specific transaction messages enabled or disabled.

Think that about covers it.

[Wolfie]

Backing up Rentahamster here.

The current model of trading items can be replicated in a simpler fashion by having everything be done from a window interface. When you remove the need to physically render the retainer NPCs, you no longer need to separate them in zones or come up with complex organizational requirements and penalties. It also does wonders for server stability and user friendliness.

[Gundammeister]

Great thread and some good reads. I couldn't possibly quote all the great ideas but I will innovate or reinforce some of the things I thought important:

The three wards do need to be combined. Whether it's an added option to search the other city's wards or removing the other two, just leaving Ul'dah's. By consolidating the 3 main wards, the economy won't be segregated and will strengthen.

I don't want to remove the way you have to physically go to the specific ward, and physically buy it from that specific retainer. I think that is one of the many things that give FFXIV its charm. However some suggestions were made here that could ease the process, such as making less wards but making 4 or 5 instances if each depending on how many retainers are in that ward.

A search box in addition to the item search is needed. So I can just type in what I'm looking for rather than hunt it down. Sometimes I can't remember where all these components are.

I really like the player driven economy. Only a few other games use a player driven economy and I believe that when it's done right and set up like it is in FFXIV it is more dymanic and fun. In terms of strengthening the economy, first I think consolidation of the 3 main wards would help tremendously, but new players will as well; there would be a greater demand for lower ranked gear at resonable prices, and thus demand for all the crafting components needed for those items as well. That being said it seems to me that the population is rising (I'm on Selbina) but I'd be interested to see the official numbers on that. I don't think they should merge any servers though until after the PS3 launch, which is another thing that should bring a lot of new players.

CCP (creators of EVE) actually employs an economist, and it works well for them. Maybe SE, if not already doing that, should look into something along those lines as well.

See you in Eorzea!

[Roaran]

While noone was really interested it seems, I'm still convinced this is the best solution:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...e-Market-Wards.


Population Increases will = more instability, more market crashes. You have to either link the wards to diffuse the population, or remove the need to display so many retainers at once.

After diffusing the population, this could still become an issue later down the road, if the games popution triples or quadruples, which is highly likely if the game becomes acceptable. So, essentially, you will have to remove the Retainers from the wards themselves.

Then everything else is created to address this; Referencing Retainers, and summoning single ones to your location from a single common point is the most streamlined possibility.

The option is then there to link the market wards with extreme ease should the developers choose to do so.

I'm convinced that mucking around with this wards system any further is a waste of time, and until I see otherwise, Devs need to implement a similar system.