Auction House system to complement existing Market Areas (Discussion) [dev1019]

[Betelgeuzah]

Yeah, these are the suggestions I like. No one should "axe" anything unless necessary, and the best option is to a) keep the existing feature as a part of your idea, and b) make it as easy to implement as possible.

[Nerlith]

I'm in favor of a limited AH to complement the Wards.

What I'd like to see is the Wards for each city turned into a single playmap instead of a pile of Instances of the same ugly hallway. With more stalls to rent. And some NPC's to provide crafting access at a basic level.

Get rid of the instancing, and add a new area to each city for the New Market.
Put a bunch of player rentable stalls, small up front fee but no taxes and anything sells.
Add a search NPC that will allow you to highlight anyone in the market area with an item, much like now but allowing for searches by name not just pre-selected items.
Then put an AH similar to what the parent described, with heavy taxes geared towards high-end specialty items only.

But don't stop there. Add more of these, but on smaller scales. Each with an NPC that will let you search all the items up for sale within that mini-market's radius. Put them in obvious places, like outside the Adventurer's Guilds, or other spots where a billion people crowd around selling stuff right now. Put them out in the field, near crystals and so forth.

Put some NPC's in some of the remote mini-market locations which allow for an indirect AH use. They way it would work is you park your retainer in the Market Ward. Then when you talk to that NPC, you can place bids or sell items using the cash and inventory space of the retainer you have parked. To make it interesting, put in some spots which have access to all three AH's, but the NPC's charge a use fee on top of the AH fees. That's just one idea, but all kinds of good fun could be had here.


I think the combination of better consolidation of the existing Wards space, plus the addition of min-market areas all over the world map, and finally the semi-limited AH would end up being really neat.


edit-
I also meant to mention- the player rentable stalls should offer more benefit than they do right now.
I would like the shops to have the ability to offer a third type of selling, in addition to per item or per stack: blind auction. Yup, that's right. When sellers search for the item in the market, they see "bid" for the price.

[origamikitsune]

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.

[Seif]

This was already in the poll people voted for the Auction House. That's it. They promised to do it and they should anything halfway there would be a let down and a broken promise from the devs.

[origamikitsune]

This was already in the poll people voted for the Auction House. That's it. They promised to do it and they should anything halfway there would be a let down and a broken promise from the devs.

I don't recall them saying they would promise to do it. Last I saw they were considering the viability. More to the point, that poll was taken before they added the ability to search the market wards. I wonder if the poll would turn out the same way now. Probably, but I doubt with such drastic revisions. And if the market wards offered the same functionality as the basic auction house in most MMOs? Then I doubt it.

Either way, can you link me to the dev letter or interview where they confirmed positively that we are going to get an auction house?

[Shadowskill]

@ Amineri

Have one question concerning this system.

Lets say I put a bid on an Item. would there be a way (other then going to the auction NPC) to see if the current bid I placed has been out bid by another, as well the time remaining for the act of placing another bid to ensure my ownership of the item?

Kind of like the linkpearl for item you placed on the auction, just one for the person with bids in place.
Sorry if you covered this, was a question that surfaced while reading through the post, which seems like a pretty solid platform to build from. nice idea ^.^

[origamikitsune]

I raised the same question, and the resulting discussion we came up with a couple of ideas, including the idea that Ami had for the "Accounts" idea, where you get a link pearl and are informed. We also batted around ideas like a system message to notify you when you have won an auction (either a standard system message, or an NPC sending you a tell) without the need for an additional pearl. Either idea is viable, certainly.

[Shadowskill]

Hmmm an idea I can think of. much like the linkpearl one (actually uses this) in Forza 2 (Race game) you can select say the linkpearl, this would open up a kind of mini menu listing all the item you currently are bidding on as well the time left for each.

A way that could be used to help notify the player of activity on the items they have a bid on, have the pearl (much like with missions) light up a different color. or even same color.

This is just an idea I could think of, hopefully it serves some support to help build the auction system of the OP

[Coombah]

The only things that need to be changed about FFXI's auction house are the number of items that may be sold, and the user interface/lag. maybe an upgraded UI for better sorting and searching.

This is how I see it. Keep it like XI'S just make some tweaks.

[BruceyBruceyBangBang]

LOL @ 100k listing fee. Yeah, let's implement a system no one will be using due to just the listing price alone.