Is Selling using Retainer an Outdated System?

[Hycinthus]

Listing and selling items using retainer seems like an outdated remnant system from 1.0, and I think it has a need to be streamlined in 2020. Please do educate me if there’s a benefit to this, or if it’s supposed to be fun doing one additional step to list or delist items from Marketboard, but there doesn’t seem to be any real reason why we cannot just sell and list directly by clicking on the marketboard. Is it an RMT prevention system that cannot be done in another way? Anyway for new players, this is very unintuitive. Marketboard in general should be able to do buy and sell together.

Also, having to recall and everything gets delisted just to adjust a price on one item/ or when you have to add 1 item because you forgot/or to check a price - this seems a bit weird to me. Items should not all get delisted just because you're adding 1 more.

I think the listing/delisting function can be taken out separately from the Retainer.

Retainer can remain, just like other MMOs, as storage NPC, and yes, we can keep the ventures, glam, and such. (To be honest, I think ventures were added in a way, to justify having retainers or making retainers fun, and it's giving me a feeling that this seems like a relic system from a time long gone).

[Gothicshark]

well taking the troll bait here, and replying.

First it creates a hard limit on how much people can sell, and how quickly someone can alter prices on the market. Sure there are ways around this, ie more retainers, and multiple accounts, but in the end SE makes money when people try and bypass the limitations of the system.

I'll use WOW's AH as an Example. you can post as many Auctions as you want, you can use addons to scan what is on the Auction, and set prices to manipulate the market quickly and efficiently. Gold Sellers make a huge profit grinding out crafting materials and posting them on the AH at rates lower than most players feel is worth the grind. One player can have thousands of Auctions of the current raid their crafting materials, making profit grinding less effcitiant for normal players.

Here, you have 40 slots on the market with your paid account. Hard limit. You can pay money for 20 more slots aka an additional retainer. This reduces the ability of goldsellers being able to flood the markets. They can and do, but it costs them a lot of money to do so. As they have to have a paid account, with additional retainers, and usually additional characters all in the same FC so they can transfer inventory, and have more than the base 40 slots. This takes time, and energy away from the collection grind, forcing the gold sellers to have to have additional accounts just to farm the crafting reagents.

So unlike WOW which one character can do all the work, grind and sell, here the gold farmers have to have multiple accounts, multiple retainers, multiple characters, and they can't keep track of the market instantly like they can in wow. Basically they have slowed goldsellers rate of growth significantly by using the retainers. Killing the market for them, and making it easier for SE to track sellers here.

[Skivvy]

Why is this an automatic troll thread? Poor Highlanders are now getting stereotyped.

SE has this fascination with menus, seems they can never have quite enough. The retainer system is just another victim of exteme-menuing which makes it insanely clunky and annoying to work with.

Other games make it as simple as "right-click, sell at AH, and BAM! DONE!". SE is like, nahhh, that's far too dull. "Right-click bell, choose retainer, click through pointless greeting from retainer, click on 'sell items', BAM DONE!". Have fun if you have to switch to another retainer to sell more items.

The system is pretty awful.

[Shougun]

My counter question is- to the future of markets, can I just get a robot run market? lol. I liked the gold concept in Diablo 3 where it ran the whole gold market for everyone. Like gems, which it did too. No listing prices, no waiting, no whatever. Just buy and sell to the NPC who takes the cut they need, well in this case it was real money so Blizzard was kind of... scrooge mcduck'ing it and so I won't say that part is 'nice' (please no real money AH for an FF MMO, leave that to some other crazy game), but in terms of a in game currency it's good (gil sink = good).

As Gothic points out for wow, but is also true for FFXIV- just not as easily accessible, are bots that manipulate and run the markets (as well as the occasional person who has exceptional amounts of time on their hands lol). There are some nice to have limits with retainers, well and I'm sure SE loves the extra money for people who want to sell more... Although I think we could see a listing price slow the bots down, slightly.

There is still toying around to be done via a robot but just far more set it and forget it. You don't really need listings anymore, no more buying a stack of 50 because that was the only one for sell and you only needed 15. There may need to be a starting action, perhaps an auction I suppose, and there probably needs to be some activity for confidence, so data center wide servers at least, but seeing as they tend to work 'fine' in single player games, at least those that put a lot of effort into them, that something as important as the economy could theoretically have a robot run the show.

well taking the troll bait here, and replying.

Is it though? I like the reasons you gave, but I don't get that vibe from OP.

Why is this an automatic troll thread? Poor Highlanders are now getting stereotyped.

SE has this fascination with menus, seems they can never have quite enough. The retainer system is just another victim of exteme-menuing which makes it insanely clunky and annoying to work with.

Other games make it as simple as "right-click, sell at AH, and BAM! DONE!". SE is like, nahhh, that's far too dull. "Right-click bell, choose retainer, click through pointless greeting from retainer, click on 'sell items', BAM DONE!". Have fun if you have to switch to another retainer to sell more items.

The system is pretty awful.

I was thinking it wasn't so bad until you reminded me of all the menus you have to go through lol. WoW gets a lot of help with some amazing mods that make the process really easy, but yeah lots of windows and clicks in FFXIV's.... XD.

Might be because I garden and chocobo feed at the same time I market but makes me think of those too where I'm thinking they could have 20-50% less menus and clicks at least lol.

[Fawkes]

Retainers exist so SE can monetize storage and auction house sale slots. There's probably enough people paying for the maximum number of retainers and the crummy app that it won't change no matter what we do.

[Jin-]

Why is this an automatic troll thread? Poor Highlanders are now getting stereotyped.

SE has this fascination with menus, seems they can never have quite enough. The retainer system is just another victim of exteme-menuing which makes it insanely clunky and annoying to work with.

Other games make it as simple as "right-click, sell at AH, and BAM! DONE!". SE is like, nahhh, that's far too dull. "Right-click bell, choose retainer, click through pointless greeting from retainer, click on 'sell items', BAM DONE!". Have fun if you have to switch to another retainer to sell more items.

The system is pretty awful.

This pretty much. Oh, wait the useless unskippable animations

[Vahlnir]

Nah, retainers are not really outdated. That's how I make most of my gil. Some things may take a little while to sell but eventually everything gets sold.

[Kurando]

The only thing outdated about Retainers is their current inventory space. I know I know, SE do it so people spend more money on additional retainers, but adding let's say 5-10 extra slots each expansion isn't going effect their income much at all and everyone gets a little more space to play with.

[kaynide]

It more has to do with how unoptimized the game is; the menu system is a kind of necessary evil for PlayStation 3 era memory problems and controller input.

The best solution would be to make it more in line with Guildwars 2 with a 1 click option to “sell junk” and a mouse based UI.

In the UI as a whole there are just way too many clicks to do anything. It is extremely cumbersome. The entire retainer window should just be a single panel with all the day to day stuff as 1 click options (eg “collect venture rewards and resend” instead of view report, collect items, resend).

Moreover, GW2 allows you to sell as many items as you want which sell at a price per item. There is no awkward stack of 13 items..just 13 individual items, each being sold at x price. I have mixed feelings on that since there is some market strategy that is fun to play that is outright removed.

[Theodric]

I'd definitely like to see the game do away with the excess in menus. A complete rework as to how retainers operate would be wonderful - and with how both crafting and gathering have been made much more user friendly and responsive, I'm cautiously optimistic that such a thing might be on the table for retainers as well.