Not sure if anyone has expressed this view yet or not, but I actually thoroughly enjoyed the Auction House economy of FFXI. I don't need an npc with fancy decorations and prices that are not shown in an easy to use search feature. I find it easier to "run a business" in a game when I can count on my buyers looking at two things: quality and price. The faster paced economy, in my opinion, actually results in a greater opportunity for the informed seller.

It's rather easy to work with a fast-paced buyer driven economy as a seller. You simply need to have a moderate ability to understand what your competition or buyers are thinking, or put some loopholes to good use. A constant running knowledge of prices of competitors and similar goods goes a long way.

Just a few examples from my experiences as a 100 Bonecrafter in XI:

When augmented gear came out, I proceeded to purchase every single mat available for Igqira Weskits. Through being able to buy every ingredient, I was able to control the market by removing my competition from the seller pool. I was able to keep up with this for a week or two, until somebody finally figured out the solution was to go farm up the materials. I was able to make a decent profit out of it all, the trick being to npc about 50% of the results, and raise the auction house price dramatically. Even after other crafters started being able to make them again, the market did not return to it's regular value for a few months after.

Undercutting other sellers was often pretty easy, and most of the time you'd end up with effective results from doing so. The big issue here, and where most people probably falter in a fast-paced buyer driven auction house system, is that you cannot over-saturate the market while not allowing your competition to unload their goods. The best way to do this was through diversity of goods, and only staying in a market long enough that you don't annoy your competition to the point of lowering their prices to where neither of you can profit.

Updates were typically the biggest thing to spark a renewed interest in a particular piece of equipment. The most recent example of this I can recall is when uncursed gear could get augments, crafting cursed items became very lucrative. Knowing how much to raise prices by is key in a situation like this. This can also go the other way, where for example in XIV, I stupidly bought a silver tricorne which halved in price after this most recent update.


I am finding the FFXIV economy rather easy to get into, though I will say I prefer the Auction House system to what we have now. What we have now is more of a combination of the player controlled NPC market, but with a perfect information economy listing board. I personally would rather have the hidden prices as they were in FFXI.

(TLDR/Conclusion)
I suppose my response to the article linked to by OP, would be something to the effect that, any player that prides themselves at being an effective merchant won't be stinted in a perfect information economy. Any player that feels stinted simply lacks the know-how to thrive in such an economy. I'm not saying people who can't achieve successful results with an auction house system are idiots, they just don't have the experience with such a system to be able to use it to their advantage.