Not being able to buy single items from a stack on the marketward.

[ogopogo]

Some very good points being made but there is a prevalent point of view I'd like to address

It's not a technical thing. It's for the same reason you don't play poker with 8 jokers in the deck, you would be changing the game completely.

Pehapes I'm too dense, but quite frankly I don't understand how your analogy relates to the point that I made, which in case if you forgot, is to allow seller the option to choose whether to sell a stack as bulk or individual items.

The first point you made that "people will only buy items from the lowest price/item in the market." is irrelevant because even if sellers are allow to sell each items in a stack individually, the ones being sold in bulk will still have a discount because seller will set different prices just as they would when you have to put each item up one by one.

I believe yours and many others' issue is with HOW MANY single item a seller is allowed to put on the market, which is what giving seller the check box without adding additional limitation would result in changing. While a person selling 40 individual items will have to use up 40 retainer slots to put his inventory on the market with the current system, he will only have to use 1 slot to put those same 40 items on the market if you give him the ability to sell a stack as individual items.

Also, I'd like to point out that just like Elasia described, the current system does nothing to stop RMT from making a tons of alt and undercutting others by making a million mules to get the job done. In fact, I'd think the situation would be worse because a player would have to scroll through 8 pages of cheaply farmed material that an RMT can put up on the market board with a script or bot program, while legitimate player would have to do the whole process by hand.

However, I believe that same limit the current system enforces can easily be achieved WITHOUT making the UI clunky and horrbily inefficient to use. Under the current system, the seller will have to click on an item, set the price and the size of the stack one by one until he does the whole process 40 times just to put his inventory on the market and the buyer will also have to click on 40 individual items and buy them one at a time if he wants 40 and not 99 items. On the other hand, if you give seller the check box to sell a stack as individual items, you can STILL make each item he has in that stack take up one retainer slot while selling a whole stack in bulk will also take up one retainer slot, this way, the artificial limit SE places on the seller will remain unchanged, but the usability of the market board will be significantly improved.

To make my very own analogy. Angry Retailer, my Roegadyn retainer, owns a stall on Saphire Avenue Exchange that has 40 shelve spaces. He has an inventory of 99 fairy apples to sell. However, Yoshida, the almighty god of Eorzea, has decreed that you may only put ONE apple on each shelve space if you'd like to sell them individually, further more, you are only allowed to carry out one apple at a time from the storeroom two blocks away and must also label each one individually; alternatively you may magically shrink a sealed barrel of 99 apples to fit on one shelve space instead. Because this is such a pain in the ass to do, Angry Retailer decided to ask his fellow merchant to rise up together to protest this decision. What they propose instead is to either sell the magically shrunken barrel of 99 apples taking up only one shelve space, or to sell a normal unsealed box of apples that would take up as many shelve spaces as there are apples in the box. And this, my fellow merchant, is what I believe can be done to maintain the same limit of how many individual items a player can sell at a time without sacrificing usability and making everyone's life miserable.

[Jinko]

I like ogopogo idea, but I would take it one step further, instead of having 40 slots why not have a limited number of items slots ? (I believe WoW does this)

This means whether you sell in solid stacks or (lets call them loose) stacks both types of players are only allowed to sell a specific amount of items.

I am sure some people in here would grumble at that but I see this as evening the playing field and also stopping RMT from posting up multiples of 1's and knocking everyone else off the sellers list.

Last time I checked out WoW (5.1 MoP) I was able to put up so many Items, I never reached a cap xD

Yea the cap is massive.

I remember back in Cata I put up a load of enchanting mats in 1s and I got an error I couldn't add any more items lol. (auctioneer is the best )

[TirionCrey]

Last time I checked out WoW (5.1 MoP) I was able to put up so many Items, I never reached a cap xD

[Elasia]

Also, I'd like to point out that just like Elasia described, the current system does nothing to stop RMT from making a tons of alt and undercutting others by making a million mules to get the job done. In fact, I'd think the situation would be worse because a player would have to scroll through 8 pages of cheaply farmed material that an RMT can put up on the market board with a script or bot program, while legitimate player would have to do the whole process by hand.

Yeah RMT can be a real thorn to actual miners/botanists, for the most part they usually have always seemed to stick around lower level materials and not a lot of work with finished goods which has always kinda baffled me myself.. sadly i've learned a good bit of mandarin just from the sheer volume of materials i end up consuming.., also considering rmt can power level fast through botting i have no doubt they will end up making tons of mules to get their wares out there.. only thing to really slow them down is the forced main quest with the dungeon crawls to get retainers

Also I've had up to a few thousand items in dealing with mostly cut jewels on the wow ah.. as far as ore with miners posting it up.. i've seen a variety of people posting from singles to half stacks to full stacks.. but the thing with wow is the powerful addon system... you tell it to buy it all out and it will suck out all of it as long as its at or under a certain price per piece regardless of stack size.

[EmmaSwan]

I really hope they listen and add this feature. Basically make it like GW2. You put X number of items for Y gil each, and people can buy as little or as many as they want. Throw in Buy Orders and accessing the Market Board without Retainers and I'd be pretty happy.

[Eragon]

This is my biggest complaint right now. It's an obvious setback for buyers because I don't want to spend 100k on a stack when I only want 1 of an item. As for the seller, idk why I would defend being able to only sell items as a stack. When I put items up for sale I always base the price on how much I want per item. If I have 50 items in a stack up for sale I would be more than happy if people picked at the stack, the money is still going in my pocket. It quickens the economy, allowing a constant buying and selling of items. There will always be undercutting but if I am able to sell 20 items out of my stack of 50 before having to lower the price of the rest to stay competitive, that's still more money in my pocket than if I had to undercut my entire stack. If you really feel like you can dominate the market and make more money selling items in a stack then okay, whatever works for you, but I think adding the option like in 1.0 is something that is necessary from a buyer's perspective.

[Ex-SOLDIER]

They should present the option to the seller to either sell the whole stack or allow others to buy individuals from it. It only makes sense if you think about it.

[Raldo]

They should present the option to the seller to either sell the whole stack or allow others to buy individuals from it. It only makes sense if you think about it.

Also that's what 1.0 did. Don't change what don't need fixin'.

[Roaran]

There is no instance where it benefits anyone to restrict players from buying individual items from stacks.

[-Aleth-]

Remember, one of the many issues people had with 1.0 was the unintuitive interface.

On the markets buy screen there are these little yellow triangles next to listings that look very much like buttons that control how many items you wish to purchase from a stack.

If you did a heat-map of where first time-market users click, I bet these get quite a few clicks even though they do nothing. I found it frustrating to see things that looked like the control I was looking for (to buy a number of items from a stack) only for it to do nothing useful. My initial reaction was that it was a bug or broken.

Perhaps for this reason, should there be no change to the way stacks are sold, the triangles should be removed as they are misleading, frustrating and made me think the game client was broken.

Edit: I don't have early access so let me know if they have gone since p4.