DevTalk: Detailed Analysis of Depopulation in Limsa/Grid and How to Fix It

[Rentahamster]

Hi Renta,

Great thread! Clear, well-thought out points and solutions brought up. Well done!

Thanks

I agree with most of your points, but the 2 I'd disagree with would be:

(1) Unifying of the Markets - Not really disagreeing on the basic level, but on the level that SE needs to provide a solution for better Searching and Display Options; and realistically, a Square version of the SEC monitoring Fair Trade / Better Business Practices. Specifically:

Right now, we only see the Top 20 (Cheapest) Items on Search Results. By unifying the markets (and when this game gets more players on, and when SE grants us the ability to buy/get a 3rd Retainer (and 4th, etc.)), I can't imagine how the busier items are going to sell for many people. Even now (during the slowest time), for categories like Iron Nuggets or Iron Ore, all I see are:

ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
ajfxygg x99 200 gil
xyzb x99 225 gil
xyzb x99 225 gil
xyzb x99 225 gil
xyzb x99 225 gil
xyzb x99 225 gil
etc.

It's beyond the scope of this thread to discuss how to solve that, but it's part of the problem of unifying markets. We'd get a lot of potential RMT Companies that want to control a market: They'd just use 2 or 3 of their extra Retainers, Dump their Goods at super low prices to drive out the competition, and then jack up the prices after everyone's gone.

The retainer capacity issue is more a problem with the game and server code, in my opinion. If they just scrap the NPC retainers for now and stick with a menu-driven interface, they could fix a lot of these problems really easily.

Item search could be optimized more with the elimiation of redundant listings if the same character has multiple stacks of the same item for sale at the same price.

As for your point about RMT, "driving out the competition" in an MMO doesn't really work like how it does in the real world. In an MMO, there is no barrier to anyone farming the same stuff that RMT bots do.

Plus, with a price history that goes back a full year, forcefully manipulating perceived price becomes very hard and very expensive to do.


But anyway, improving the item search feature does not address the issues that a unified wards would address - it wouldn't encourage players to travel to other cities at all. The point of a unified wards is so that a player feel free to go to another city, but not be punished for being outside the access of the Uldah wards.

(2) Global Shout: If it's a Channel you have to actively Subscribe to (and it's OFF (Unsubscribed) by default), I think it'd be OK. Otherwise, I'd be against having one.

I would have the default set to off. With the addition of more chat tabs, the best way to customize the display for global shouts would be to have them all in a separate tab.

Honestly, I'm a little surprised at the opposition to optional global shouts. It has more positive implications for social activity and player interaction than negative ones. After all, isn't player to player interaction what an MMO is supposed to be all about?