[Request] Merge Mercantile Houses

[Dzian]

Mercantile Houses were released last patch.
For those who haven't gotten around to using them yet, they basically give you access to search in the ward of any city from any city.

Here's the problem though.

Uldah's wards are up to the neck in stock and variety while the other two are always empty.

I propose they are merged into a single Mercantile House and that the search retrieves results from all three cities in a single window as to foment players to start placing their retainers outside uldah.

Like this post if you agree.

i thought that was what was happening when i read the original notes. sucks still if the search only searches one

[Alhanelem]

There really should be more retainer bells, out of convenience, not just because of overcrowding.

I'd personally find it especially awesome if I could summon retainers to my inn room.

[Delsus]

There really should be more retainer bells, out of convenience, not just because of overcrowding.

I'd personally find it especially awesome if I could summon retainers to my inn room.

Hell yeah I wanna heck the bed with my retainer

[Davorok]

There really should be more retainer bells, out of convenience, not just because of overcrowding.

I'd personally find it especially awesome if I could summon retainers to my inn room.

If they just allowed Retainers in rooms and put the Mercantile Selections in our rooms, there would be no overcrowding (and they could get rid of the Bell outside the Inn.)

I have been saying for awhile, just let our Retainers handle all the Market Transactions from inside our Inn Rooms.
(as for lore, our Retainers could simply be "teleporting" back and forth from the Markets to our Inns.)

[Roaran]

I think having a single mercantile house containing NPCs for each city would be much more satisfactory then having to zone each time to check other cities' goods

[Teakwood]

Unfortunately (and amazingly), it seems like their instant-item-buy code is actually linked to the character's /physical position in Eorzea/. Presumably, in order to buy from a bazaar, you have to be in the same zone as the character you're buying from; the transaction is handled by a zone server, and each Market Wards is handled by a different zone server, so you couldn't be in all three market wards at the same time like that.

When you go to the Ul'dah mercantile house from Gridania, your character is actually /in/ Ul'dah during that time period. Presumably, the cost/benefit of removing all three market wards and replacing them with a single Wards shared over all three cities is prohibitive (at the very least, it'd just re-cause the exact same problems Ul'dah MWs are currently seeing), so they've implemented this as a stopgap until 2.0.

[Antipika]

I believe that server and wards are poorly designed right now. Based on testing with 2 characters logged at the same time I noticed the following :

- When you direct purchase an item, your character virtually "zone in" and "zone out" to make the item purchase. Pre-1.22, when purchasing an item from outside the wards, the "freeze" was very long, our character was basically disappearing, the purchase was made then our character was re-appearing.

By having a mule next to the character doing the purchase, I noticed that my main character didn't receive couple of /shouts that were sent while I was purchasing items. Also my main character did disappear from my mule character screen during the purchase. Which confirmed that characters need to "virtually zone in/out" in order to directly purchase an item.

Everyone also noticed that pre-1.22 when you would purchase an item from inside the wards, the "freeze" during the purchase was way shorter. Why? Because you were already inside the area "Market_Ward_XX", your character only had to zone virtually from Inside the wards to inside the wards, and that is very fast compared to Ul'dah > Wards > Ul'dah.

All right, now how mercantile houses work? My guess is that each mercantile house is an instance linked to a city and its corresponding wards. See it as an extra market wards row. The "Mercantile row" (actually the map is exactly the same). Each city posses its own dedicated row. Which make it possible to buy relatively "quickly" an item from the same city.

When you are in the Ul'dah Mercantile House, it's like being inside one of Ul'dah Market row, hence why you can search items from Ul'dah Wards and also make direct purchase. SE just enabled a form of direct teleportation to Mercantile Houses.

Therefore having a single area with NPCs of 3 cities is not technically feasible (or SE didn't figure any workaround yet). While enabling players to teleport from A to B is technically easy.

So SE just had to :

- Create 3 instances
- Move NPC from each cities that used to be outside, inside each respective instances
- Enable direct teleportation to and from these instances

= Easy and do-able with current limitations.

I really wish DEVs would confirm the above if this was correct. They're doing whatever they can to hide how poorly the game was designed, but we can see it. If we were told straight "look servers are working that way so..." then players would stop to complain and/or ask for things that are impossible to do with the current game.

[ShinChuck]

I'm just going to have to accept we're going to get poor coding and half baked implementations (and it'll be blamed on earlier decisions or the "server") until 2.0, and hopefully it ends there.

[Zyph]

Merchantile Houses made things even more complicated, I wish Item Search was still available to select without having to go into a ward first.

[Teakwood]

They've actually really openly stated that the reason for the kludge they've got presently is because the servers and original code suck, and it's really not hard to figure out what's going on here behind the scenes. I don't see any reason why we'd need a dev response past what we've already gotten, which is "Yup, that's the planned spec, this is what we implemented as a stopgap."

Really, the entire game is like this, and will be until 2.0; there's not much any of us can do. It's pretty convenient, at present, and they've worked around some incredible (and very absurd) design mistakes in the process, which is impressive to me at least as a programmer who's had to clean up other people's code in the past. xD