When Ami and I were chatting about her AH idea, I brought up the idea for a truly blind auction system. If you set up that sort of option you have two problems:

1.) The auction is blind, so a person bids. Their bid is not high enough, they are told the bid is not high enough. They rebid. They are still not high enough. They bid again. Eventually, they figure out what the sale price is, and still only bid marginally above the current winning bid. Effectively, the auction is not blind, unless you limit the number of bids a person can make.

2.) By limiting the number of bids a person makes, they bid, they don't win. People tend to bid low and work their way up. They get screwed out of winning an item they can actually afford. To top it off, if people bid low, the seller ends up loosing money. Because of the risk of loosing money, nobody puts items up on the auction house. This can be fixed by displaying the sale price of past auctions for that item, giving people a reference point from where to start. It would take a little bit for people to actually reach equilibrium, which is fine except...

3.) If you display a list of past prices, you have a system that is remarkably like the system in 11, except that instead of a buy it now option, the auction takes a couple days. It also provides duplicate features of the Market system, by displaying the prices of items.

The idea was to create a system that is unique to FF14, and hopefully MMOs in general, while at the same time complimenting the Market wards without replacing them.