Why do you want an Auction House? (discussion)[dev1019]

[TheCastle]

I didnt play 11 long enough to speculate but just seeing a trend here..... did something really bad happen to the ah on 11? people do seem to have this un-natural fear of them putting in an ah, look whats really gonna happen if someone trys to buy up item x? the sellers are gonna rush out to get more to replace item x, so the guy trying to manipulate the ah isnt gonna have control long, and this is something easier accomplished with marketwards, with no price history search and all, people need to quit being so afraid of change if they really want the game "fixed"

People are referring to a point in time when FFXI's economy experienced incredible inflation. The reason for the inflation was due to the ability to hack the client to use fishing skill to fish up golden beds and blank items that can be vendored for a large sums of gil in a very short time. The influx of fresh gil was incredible and prices for everything sky rocketed to a point of insanity. Most people did not know how to deal with the inflation and most people did not even know why it was happening so they blamed RMT taking advantage of the auction house.

SE solved the problem by targeting RMT directly and even at one point directly attacked fishing bots by placing high level goblins around fishing locations. The experience was extremely memorable and seems to have scared the population.

Once these tricks were resolved you had incredible deflation to follow and that meant everyone was once again dealing with "EVERYONE UNDERCUTS ME QQ!!" The process lasted years before things fully leveled out.

edit: to give an idea of how insane the inflation was. Most high ticket items like Kirin's Osede was SELLING for the maximum amount of gil you can carry on one character. People were able to fund dynamis runs by farming spider webs for a couple hours a night. Scorpion harness for 40,000,000 gil!