I came here to say the title of this thread.

I reinstalled the game recently, coming in after having quit soon after release. I made a new character and got him up to 14 in just a few hours. I was feeling pretty good about things. Then I decided "maybe I should go sell some of this stuff I've got so I can buy gear."

Then I got back to town, remembered I needed a retainer, got one, gave her my junk, and set off for the markets. Then I got there, searched through the main things I wanted to price, and tried to set her up in a market. Except I couldn't, presumably because the place was wall to wall NPCs already.

I completely forgot how horrible this was. It's a cute idea in theory, but trying to emulate the realism of a real market and having to go to vendor to vendor, and even with the search function having to go and find them, is nonsense.

Make a decent auction house, then tell everyone they've got two weeks to get their junk out of the market before it all vanishes into the abyss. This market idea needs to be purged with fire. Even the AH in FFXI, as horrible as that was (hello mystery prices and 7 item caps!), was less miserable that this mess.