Repair system discussion

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The AH is for "new" or "like new" equipment. It's more of a retail store than a pawn shop.

Retail stores sell pre-owned items. Also, why not allow player Bazaars to avoid this restriction as well? While we're at it, add a coat-opening "Whaddayou buyin'?" emote that invokes a black-market atmosphere

For a little over 600 gil for a weathered tool and 4 goldsmith leves you could have repaired that brass gladius. What you and the OP are not seeing is that this is a mechanic to limit the amount of gear that recirculates in the system. Without the appropriate craft leveled your options are to vendor or materia your gear (or pay a DoH to repair so you can recirculate the item). This keeps the economic cycle humming, crafters need to make new gear to replace the stuff you couldn't recirc, and gatherers have to get items to sell to the crafters.

So yes, the system is working just fine. It is not "flawed" as the OP seems to think.

Regardless of how easy it would have been to level the craft, that still doesn't change the fact that I couldn't simply hand over an item to a friend without jumping through a hoop. The only other MMO I've played is FFXI (on and off since the PS2 launch), which is morbidly inaccessible by today's standards, and even it did not have these restrictions. I would be shocked to see if this "feature" pervades most modern, successful MMOs. The trading restriction is neither convenient or "immersive", which is funny, because those two concepts seem to be diametrically opposed on this forum.

I understand that the repair system is a gil sink and SE wants to limit the amount of gear that flows throw the Wards. The problem is that this leads to inventory overload on the player's end, which leads exactly to what you said: vendor the gear or convert it.

As a result, in my experience, it has been difficult to find specific pieces of low to mid level gear in the wards. This makes sense: a crafter's primary behavior is likely going to be making the cheapest synths for the most EXP and/or profit, and that doesn't translate into variety of gear in the wards. Later, the materia system kicks in, increasing the possibility that rarely-made equipment simply vanishes from the economy.

The system is working too well if that is its intention. And before you say "just buy the mats and shout for someone to make it for you," I wouldn't need to waste any more time lingering in Ul'dah if other players could just sell their unwanted gear without requiring them to shout for someone to repair it.