What would be the justification of having retainers if there were no market wards?

These jolly zombies exist to hold and sell your crap. IIRC the idea was to mimic the bazaars of XI without gumming up areas outside/within the cities and to allow you to sell your crap overnight without staying logged in. They were given there own collection of zones so prevent the game from crashing (read: wards crash, game does not)

So what do you propose? It wouldn't make much sense to keep the retainers if we're selling things through a market counter/auction house. But if square removes the retainers, the playerbase will rage even harder because that's 110 slots of precious inventory nuked.

My proposal would be give us MORE options, not less. Let the ones who want to buy from the counter at a slightly increased tax. Let the people who want to "play" the wards play them (btw, if you have ever gone to buy gear/weapon/items from a retainer and while you were there said "oh look, this retainers has a _____ for cheap. I'll pick that up too, sucka!" then you have "played" the wards).

By adding MORE options instead of nuking them you tend to make more people happy. Just sayin...