[dev1251] Penalty for using market search feature

[Llewelyn]

Gil sinks are a stupid idea to begin with. Having money go to nothing serves no real purpose. If you want to take money out of the system, there should be perks you get for it, not inconveniences you're avoiding. Especially because most gil sinks in the long run are really taking pennies out of pockets rather than being significant... it's just a pain in the ass for no reason.

In this particular case, I'm with the original poster completely. Yeah, 5% isn't that much. But it's like rubbing salt in a wound, and not even treating the wound. It's still going to be a pain to deal with retainers for the sellers, and people aren't really getting what they've been asking for.

Ever since Yoshida took over, the devs have been SO much more responsive to the community desires. But in certain areas, they're every bit as stubborn as Tanaka's team, believing they know better than what the community wants.

I'm not saying this is going to be the needle that breaks the camel's back. It's not. But while sometimes the things the community wants are a bad idea (people have complained Yoshida is doing what people want TOO much. Jury's out on that one. I'm pretty happy overall.), in this particular case, it seems so painfully obvious that this is the wrong way to go about it.

In cases where FFXIV is trying something new, and the devs have a grand vision, they should go ahead and try an experiment and see how it turns out. Risk is good. But in cases where there's a basic, simple, structure that works fantastically already and what might be useful is evolution, not revolution (or devolution, in this case)...

Basically, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. FFXI's AH was great. And the way a number of other MMOs handle it work great as well. The market wards and retainers have been one of the lowest points of FFXIV from the start, and rather than replacing the system with an alternative, they've been gradually slapping bandaids on the wound.

When other things get complete revamps, like the classes and combats... why are they insisting on keeping other things more or less the way they've always been?

Player economy should be as transparent as possible. Buying and selling isn't a game people really want to spend effort on. They want to get in, get out, and get back to the rest of the game. This is just making the market even more obvious when it should be taking more of a back seat.

Using retainers is slow and clunky. You have to trade them the items, you have to set prices, you have to keep track of what's been sold and where your money is coming from. You're using a retainer both for extra inventory storage and to control your income. Trading items is slow, and given how much they can store, it's near impossible to remember which retainer has what unless you come up with a system. I had such a system, until I decided to keep one retainer in Ul'Dah and the other wherever I'm at at the moment because I needed extra storage.

It sounds like in the future, retainers will allow you to share items between your characters. That's a FANTASTIC feature. But it should be completely separated from the buy/sell economy. Aion handled this fairly well. You got a limited amount of shared space among all your characters. Totally separate from the auction house, which honestly wasn't very good. But that's sort of my point - XIV retainers are trying to merge two totally separate ideas and it's just making things more complicated, confusing, frustrating, etc.