Market Ward concept has failed

[Souljacker]

If the reason why the wards are kept on life support is a financial one, I can't say I entirely blame SE for trying. the FF series mmo's have the unique and wonderful feature of centralizing around one character and one subscription. Unlike other MMO's on the market which gather a few extra bucks off people who have to pay to play as an alternative class. There's really was never a need for anyone to buy an extra character in FFXI unless...wait for it... you wanted extra spaces to sell stuff on the auction house. FFXIV is the same way, more or less, except switch out mules for future retainers.

Well that's not entirely true. There's probably only a handful of lesser mmos that require you to pay for additional characters - mainstream games like WoW and Rift give you ten per realm, 50 realms total or something equally ridiculous. That's a lot of characters for your subscription, and it's actually a lot less limiting than FFXI and XIV if you really take the time to think about it. FFXI could argue a convenience factor with having everything centralized, but it should in no way affect the standard mmo base price and it always felt like a heavy-handed tactic.

If they continue with these plans, I can guarantee you their next reviews will be even worse than the last ones, because when the game is fixed to a point where they CAN charge for it, what they DO charge for it will be in the spotlight. No one is going to understand why SE seems to need to charge 3$ per extra character \ 1$ per retainer when WoW lets you have 50 with your subscription.

[Aeyis]

Well that's not entirely true. There's probably only a handful of lesser mmos that require you to pay for additional characters - mainstream games like WoW and Rift give you ten per realm, 50 realms total or something equally ridiculous. That's a lot of characters for your subscription, and it's actually a lot less limiting than FFXI and XIV if you really take the time to think about it.

As someone who had...8? Maxed level characters in wow during WotLK, i can tell you that its not quite as limitless as youd think.

Why? Because all of those chars i mentioned save 1 after all different classes. >.>
Those classes have also been almost every spec imagineable, even changing things like only a few points..which really hurts you monetary gain.

FFXIV may have little available in terms of quantity of chars, but you can do A LOT more with a single character then in any 'mainstream' mmos ive played.

Actually, most games beat WoW in that aspect, seeing as how wow doesnt even have character based customizable stats points.

So as far as ''taking a little time to think about it'', take a bit longer to think about it, and youll reach the same conclusion.

[Monkeysnarf]

The market ward would be just fine if you could actually avoid wasting time and lag and buy and sell stuff from the item look-up counter...