Any word on when we will get an Auction House?

[OJtheLIONKing]

I still don't see people considering what the market wards would be like if more than the mere few hundred at most people were playing on your server. If this game was poplular, which is the goal of course, how would it look zoning into the battlecraft wards with 10,000 retainers in that tiny zone, waiting for the marked retainer to actually show up on your screen, and then trying to target him among the 10,000 surrounding him. I don't believe the market system could, or was ever designed, to support a large playerbase.

Personally I want an auction house. If se wants to try something different, maybe try making an auction house that is not only linked to all cities, but across all servers as well.

Oh I like cross-server ideas like this. To balance it, it should probably have a huge fee to put anything on there. However, for someone trying to sell an item that has just no market at all on his server, or for very rare items, this could work. This would be a good way to avoid the situation you sometimes ran into in XI where an item sells briskly on one server but not have sold at all on other servers for various reasons(Corselet, I'm looking at you...)

[ShinChuck]

I still don't see people considering what the market wards would be like if more than the mere few hundred at most people were playing on your server. If this game was poplular, which is the goal of course, how would it look zoning into the battlecraft wards with 10,000 retainers in that tiny zone, waiting for the marked retainer to actually show up on your screen, and then trying to target him among the 10,000 surrounding him. I don't believe the market system could, or was ever designed, to support a large playerbase.

You have a very good point there. And since the Wards are already mimicking AH functionality, I think the next step is to eliminate Retainers, being a relic of the original, dead Wards concept, and reserve them for banking/mule purposes. I just don't quite understand this burning desire to keep Retainers as the means of buying/selling when everything else has gone AH-style, and they do nothing but add extra work to the process.

[Betelgeuzah]

I think you're just not giving people enough credit on both sides. The players are smart, so are the dev team. They know the score and what's being said. The dev team isn't so stupid to think that a Marketplace that acts as an AH, just isn't called one, won't be good enough for people, and people similarly would be happy given all the standard options asked for.

Yet an AH is coming...

I'm sorry, I just don't believe it would be some crazy financial drain, nor do I think that's a reasonable line of thought. I've seen smaller companies make bigger changes without a problem, and removing Retainers from the equation is a relatively small issue.

It doesn't matter whether it's expensive or not, it is useless and that is what matters. It also matters what is given up in exchange for implementing this change (features that are actually useful to the game?). There has to be an exchange as long as they can not do everything they need to do. And this game has enough work for that requirement to be fulfilled.

But it is unarguably detrimental to it, and that's the point. Unlike Expeditionary force content, which I could avoid and still function in-game, Retainers are an unavoidable - and entirely unintuitive, unnecessary - aspect of buying and selling. The process could be accomplished without them.

Why is that? I'm not against making us able to buy and sell items from the search screen. I'm against removing that (and any other) feature from the Retainers. They wouldn't be useless, because in the end you could put up and look for items while browsing your mule. You could also go to the search screen and be able to do the same functions there.

[Rhianu]

You can do a lot of damage to an economy with single-point instant procurement methods.

Not if all the important pieces of gear are Rare/EX, you can't! :P

[Lebannen]

There is already a building in Limsa Lominsa assigned to be auction house. There is an insignia on the door which shows it. If you want to see it, it is down by where you board the ship. It isn't open tough.

[yukikaze_yanagi]

I would prefer a cross-city search feature, but still when ishgard will be open, it'll istantly become the new jeuno (alias, the trading center of game) so we'll just need bigger market wards XD. And in FFXI too the ah but jeuno aren't connected

[Seirra_Lanzce]

There is already a building in Limsa Lominsa assigned to be auction house. There is an insignia on the door which shows it. If you want to see it, it is down by where you board the ship. It isn't open tough.

Actually if you speak to the NPC near the door there, it says something that have to do with Court where people be judge for their crimes and stuff.

[Xagen]

I would prefer a cross-city search feature, but still when ishgard will be open, it'll istantly become the new jeuno (alias, the trading center of game) so we'll just need bigger market wards XD. And in FFXI too the ah but jeuno aren't connected

Cross City search sounds like a great idea.

Personally i think the Market wards is a better idea then an AH, but just like alot of other things in FFXIV it needs to be fixed and polished up. History lists of prices (which would give players a better idea of the prices, which would make the game econamy much more stable than it is now, now its just plane chaos). list showing normal +1 +2 +3 items instead of all items apearing as normal. Better Search function. More items in the Bazzer. . Maybe even go as far as buying from the lists and receiving your items in some sort of a mail system(but like someone sed this would make the players abit lazy :P ). Most importantly Stop the crashing of markets :S .

[Arya]

The old FFXI-style AH was useful in that you didn't need to drop retainers in specific places to sell, and you could access what was being sold in all 3 cities from any of them.

I think the current Market Wards system with the search feature is good, and it probably wouldn't require (or perhaps I am just being optimistic and showing my programming ignorance) too much effort to link the search to the other cities. Perhaps an initial menu to choose which city you want to search (if they struggle to display all 3 together).

In terms of numbers of people, the AH's were ridiculously crowded. You had to reach the NPC to be able to initiate anything, which meant clustering round 1 of a number of points. At least with the Wards you just reach a "line" in the ground and the menu is triggered. I do agree that if numbers continue to increase on servers (assuming SE can even fix lag issues that still remain with the current population numbers!), trying to cram a lot of people into 1 place will cause a lot of trouble. Perhaps just as they have already done to "load balance", the outside search area for the Wards should be a separate server in its own right (if it hasn't already been done), to handle the heavy load it will likely have?

Regarding price histories, does it really matter? If you're paying attention to important items, you'll know approximately how much they're worth from looking around. You can see what everyone selling that item is pricing at the same time. It's your choice whether to buy at those prices or not. Knowing that things were cheaper/more expensive in the past is interesting, but not exactly important in the grand scheme of things. Yellow Gremlin (http://ffxiv.yg.com/) and FFXIV Pro (http://www.ffxivpro.com/) can give you info like that.

[OJtheLIONKing]

The old FFXI-style AH was useful in that you didn't need to drop retainers in specific places to sell, and you could access what was being sold in all 3 cities from any of them.

I think the current Market Wards system with the search feature is good, and it probably wouldn't require (or perhaps I am just being optimistic and showing my programming ignorance) too much effort to link the search to the other cities. Perhaps an initial menu to choose which city you want to search (if they struggle to display all 3 together).

In terms of numbers of people, the AH's were ridiculously crowded. You had to reach the NPC to be able to initiate anything, which meant clustering round 1 of a number of points. At least with the Wards you just reach a "line" in the ground and the menu is triggered. I do agree that if numbers continue to increase on servers (assuming SE can even fix lag issues that still remain with the current population numbers!), trying to cram a lot of people into 1 place will cause a lot of trouble. Perhaps just as they have already done to "load balance", the outside search area for the Wards should be a separate server in its own right (if it hasn't already been done), to handle the heavy load it will likely have?

Regarding price histories, does it really matter? If you're paying attention to important items, you'll know approximately how much they're worth from looking around. You can see what everyone selling that item is pricing at the same time. It's your choice whether to buy at those prices or not. Knowing that things were cheaper/more expensive in the past is interesting, but not exactly important in the grand scheme of things. Yellow Gremlin (http://ffxiv.yg.com/) and FFXIV Pro (http://www.ffxivpro.com/) can give you info like that.

You incidentally mentioned a very important reason why price histories matter--we should not have to check third party sites just to know the market price for an item. In fact, the format those sites have make me think that they violate the ToS just by existing. Knowing the price history is not just relevant, but vital to the proper functioning of the economy. Without that, people can (and have) bought out all of a certain item and jacked up the price, and no one would be the wiser without the history.

The AH's being crowded would just be compounded in the Wards once the server population gets back up, because now you have to deal with legions of players AND NPCs. Even though search-marked retainers seem to get rendering priority, they can still take a while to load for me.

Really, trying to preserve this wards system would just delay what's necessary, which is to simplify this overly complicated system to make it easily usable and accessible.