Increase the amount of items listed on the Market Wards

[Dargoth_Draconia]

We already got an AH. It's called the market wards.

Seriously building "an AH" by itself won't change anything. An auction house could be great or it could be awful. Just as the market wards in 2.0 could be great or they could be awful. No matter how you call it, it all depends on the implementation.

No we don't have an AH, we have a system that has evolved into the state of almost being an AH but still lacking in every possible area. It is in no way or shape better than an AH. Scrap the craptastic system in favor of what people want. Yes, building an AH would change everything, because it would function as intended instead of being worthless. I have never played an MMO with an AH of sorts that wasn't great.

Hell if they want to keep the wards around and have an AH too I would be for that.

[Mirage]

We already got an AH. It's called the market wards.

Seriously building "an AH" by itself won't change anything. An auction house could be great or it could be awful. Just as the market wards in 2.0 could be great or they could be awful. No matter how you call it, it all depends on the implementation.

Yeah, but you're wrong. We have a terrible system that from the bottom of its soul wishes it was an auction house system, but is instead its twin brother who got his umbilical cord wrapped around his throat in his mother's womb, and was born with 5% of normal brain capacity. Even though it now has a search feature attached, this search feature is obnoxiously convoluted and doesn't allow for any sort of efficient gear comparations, filtering, or even the ability to show every sort of available gear for certain items.

No, even if you added to this game one of the worst AH systems of currently running commercial MMOs, it would be a better solution that what we have now. It would not "depend on the implementation" unless it was coded by a blind, braindead chimpanzee with no fingers.

[Neptune]

Greetings!

After checking with the version 2.0 UI team, they mentioned that there are no plans to increase the amount of items that players can list on the Market Ward; however, their focus for the new UI is to make it much easier and less stressful to sell items. This will primarily be accomplished via the drag and drop feature and option settings that disable confirmation widgets. After seeing a demonstration of the selling process I can tell you that it looked very smooth compared to the current system.

Thanks Camate for looking into this and posting some feedback. As you can imagine, I'm not relieved to hear this news and in fact I'm more worried than I was before! I noticed you checked with the UI team.. that's great that we now know something about version 2.0 that we didn't know before. This thread is about changing the current plans for version 2.0. So please check with Naoki Yoshida about this thread, since this is a Design issue and not a UI issue. Thank you Camate!

[Alhanelem]

Just tell them to scrap the crappy market wards during the beta phase and build us an AH. Everyone will be happier in the end.

We already have an auction house built, it's called the market wards. Other than the fact that you have to stick crap on retainers and there is limited capacity for those retainers, it has all the functionality of an auction house. You can search for items by name and buy directly from a UI just like any auction house in any game. Once the changes Camate described are implemented, selling stuff should have the same level of simplicity

So please check with Naoki Yoshida about this thread, since this is a Design issue and not a UI issue. Thank you Camate!

UI and design go hand in hand. Any "AH" or "trade" system works through a UI. You change the UI, you're changing the way said thing functions. You should be ecstatic, not worried. And unless you have a degree in computer science or game development, who are you to say what kind of issue any given issue is?

Yeah, but you're wrong.

He's not wrong. For the buyer, the market wards pretty much funciton exactly like an auction house. The problems that remain are associated with the sellers- These are the problems that are being addressed by what Camate posted.

It is in no way or shape better than an AH.

So, now we don't just want an AH, we want something that's "better than an AH?" What might that be, if you don't mind me asking?

We have an AH, it's called the market wards, once the bugs are fixed you'll barely even notice it's not 100% exactly the same as <insert game here>'s auction house.

Right now I only have 2 beefs with the system:

1) Retainer UI is still sluggish as all hell, this problem is to be addressed in 2.0
2) Limited capacity of market wards can prevent the player from being able to sell anything at all. Using the other city's wards doesn't solve this problem because you still need to check each city's ward seperately. (I expect this is going to be addressed based on the post, but if it's not then it needs to be)

[Mirage]

No, they do not function like a competent auction house. They function as a retarded auction house lookalike.

If I put a car chassis over a bicycle, and attach a lawn mower motor to it, that's still not a car.

[Dargoth_Draconia]

We already have an auction house built, it's called the market wards. Other than the fact that you have to stick crap on retainers and there is limited capacity for those retainers, it has all the functionality of an auction house. You can search for items by name and buy directly from a UI just like any auction house in any game. Once the changes Camate described are implemented, selling stuff should have the same level of simplicity

UI and design go hand in hand. Any "AH" or "trade" system works through a UI. You change the UI, you're changing the way said thing functions. You should be ecstatic, not worried. And unless you have a degree in computer science or game development, who are you to say what kind of issue any given issue is?

He's not wrong. For the buyer, the market wards pretty much funciton exactly like an auction house. The problems that remain are associated with the sellers- These are the problems that are being addressed by what Camate posted.

So, now we don't just want an AH, we want something that's "better than an AH?" What might that be, if you don't mind me asking?

We have an AH, it's called the market wards, once the bugs are fixed you'll barely even notice it's not 100% exactly the same as <insert game here>'s auction house.

Right now I only have 2 beefs with the system:

1) Retainer UI is still sluggish as all hell, this problem is to be addressed in 2.0
2) Limited capacity of market wards can prevent the player from being able to sell anything at all. Using the other city's wards doesn't solve this problem because you still need to check each city's ward separately. (I expect this is going to be addressed based on the post, but if it's not then it needs to be)

Wards suck man, they don't function like a proper AH. They work exactly like how Mirage said they do. In essence it is similar to an AH but only a small % as effective as an AH. The point is we want something simple and easy to use and not have to go out of our way to put our retainers in another cities wards because their isn't enough room in the main cities wards to do so. We want to go up to the AH window and click on it, list our item and bam done. Not go to wards, select a ward, load screen, attempt to call retainer, failed because it is full, goto another ward 100 times, still not find one then goto another city or w/e to attempt to drop our retainers off in an area where majority of the people don't even bother to look at to begin with. I never see people looking at the wards in the mercantile houses for LL or Grid, only Uldah.

By the way I did say "we" a lot and "we" includes you wanting a better system even though you don't want to admit to it. It will only make the game more enjoyable and presentable to new players who expect an AH not a miserable excuse for one.

More enjoyable? How? I think everyone likes checking their retainers/delivery boxes after listing their items at night to see that million gil reward waiting for you to collect for the wares you sold.

[Mirage]

Yeah. I do see people in the LL and Grid mercantile houses, though, but they certianly see a significantly less amount of traffic than the Uldahn wards.

An efficient way to buy and sell goods is important to keep the economy in good shape, and supply crafters and combatants alike with the items they need for the fairest price possible. If you have a cap selling slots that is easy to reach, people will start selling only the items that give you the highest profit margin. If someone with multiple lv50 jobs have 10 slots to sell stuff with, and 20 items in their inventory that they want to sell, they are very likely to sell the most profitable items at the open market, then NPC the rest of their stuff.

This leads to 10 less items a level 10-20 crafter can buy and level their craft with, or 10 less low-level equipment pieces that a lv20 archer can choose between. This skews the cost for low level gear because anyone who wants to sell low-level gear wants to have a profit margin that is closer to what they could get for level 40+ items, or they'll just NPC it instead.

If I could check a low level item's price history while selling, and have an option in the client to automatically list it for the median price (or some other fancy method of auto-pricing) of the last 10 sales, and if the total time for putting up 30 items for sale was roughly the same as it would be for NPCIng them, I would put these items up for sale instead of NPCing them. That would increase supply for people who needs these items. This would probably also increase the supply for all items that were made with the items i sold as well.

When selling items, you should probably pay AH fees based on how long you want to keep the item up for auction. Items shouldn't be listable forever, because then you'll end up with people using it as storage, or overcharging things by much more than they normally would. How big would the fees be? I'm no financial genius. I'm sure someone else is more suited to crunching out the exact the numbers for that.

[Jinko]

Greetings!

After checking with the version 2.0 UI team, they mentioned that there are no plans to increase the amount of items that players can list on the Market Ward; however, their focus for the new UI is to make it much easier and less stressful to sell items. This will primarily be accomplished via the drag and drop feature and option settings that disable confirmation widgets. After seeing a demonstration of the selling process I can tell you that it looked very smooth compared to the current system.

Although your post was meant to reassure us it kind of had the opposite effect.

It sounds like the dev team are being very stubborn on keeping the marketwards system, even though so many people have shown a dislike for it.

I hope its as good as you make it sound though, otherwise there is going to be a lot of negative feeback in alpha/beta.

I am very curious how they plan to solve this issue of over crowding in the marketwards.

[Halvaard_Vidan]

More item slots to sell won't help anything. What is need is the ability to scroll and view all items of that type for sale, or a separate page for +1 gear and melded gear. There is a lot of stuff I want to put up for sale but don't because it won't be visible with all the nq gear.

QTF ^ /10char

[DeadRiser]

Why can't they increase it?

I have gil to spend and can't even see the double-melded items in the wards! All the popular items being sold cover up the double-melded ones.

And before you pricks say anything, NO I am not going to personally search every single ward.