We need an AH

[Krin]

Price history will make no difference to those who don't bother to follow it, or will exploit it, which in turn will make it more or less pointless.

In response, yes and no. If 20 people are selling Lightning Crystals at 5,000 gil* a piece and someone posts a stack of 20 at 500 gil a piece, then the market will naturally correct itself. If one of the 20 people are serious market players, they will be checking on the prices of Lightning Crystals (among other things) regularly, note someone making a fire sell, buy out that person's stock, and then turn around and add the 20 crystals to their own stock at 5,000 gil a piece.

If that doesn't happen, then someone else posting a new listing of Lightning Crystals will have the incentive to do the same before posting their own at 5,000 gil. Even if no one buys it out, most people will gravitate towards the middle. You won't see someone magically post their stack of Lightning Crystals at 450 gil a piece.

Unless I spot a race to the bottom, I can generally assume that an in-demand item will sell if it's in the lower 25% of the price spread currently available. Hence, in the interest of making as much gil as possible, I need to gauge demand and determine if I need to be the cheapest, or cheap enough to come up the cheapest within the next 24 hours. However, spotting a declining market requires more than just staring at the 20 cheapest listings, it requires the entirety of everyone selling an item.

I don't need price histories, I just need the ability to manage my retainer, monitor prices, and quickly adjust my current prices such that it takes less than an entire night and a notebook to properly market a single bazaar's worth of wares.

Price histories are icing on the cake, but like I said, you can generally see trends just from the price spread. Then again, you need to be able to order things by when the retainer started selling in addition to from cheapest to most expensive.

These sorts of things very quickly, and naturally, occur to most people of mild intelligence within a month of starting to try to sell items in any sort of MMO economy. You don't necessarily need someone to tell you what items to sell.

I like that selling is a lot more work than Auctioneer averaging out the prices and undercutting by 10% while I wander off to make a sandwich. The problem is, that it's so much work, it raises the minimum amount of payoff I require to put time into it. This skews the Market Ward system up to higher value items and stops the desire to sell Sheepskin Halter Tops or whatever to others, which cuts back on the overall volume of the in-game economy.

The final leap, and you can research this yourself, is that the more volume in the overall economy, the more resistant to manipulation and meaningless price swings the economy becomes.

Most of us sellers don't want an AH, though we wouldn't mind some of it's convenience features. To be fair, I can see how in the interest of the forbidden, thread-hijacking, "i"-word, it has it's pluses. It's just that the MW's aren't quite scaling like they thought they would.

I love the MW's original concept. When I originally read about it, I imagined browsing for a piece of armor by seeing the retainer's model it, having a favorite retainer to go to because they always had the metals I wanted at reasonable prices, or perhaps finding a retainer always buying the logs I was gathering.

In reality, wards are full, no one "browses", I can't tell you of any retainers that I seek out specifically and shop on a regular basis, and I've yet to use or see someone use the "Seek Item" feature of Bazaars**. In those respects, the MW has failed it's original intentions. Hence, it needs to be deeply reworked.

EDIT: O.O; I think I ended up agreeing with you. Lol. The "yes and no" part was more in your comment on people using extra information for exploits and everyone else just ignoring it. :-)

* This is a completely arbitrary value devoid of any basis in reality.
** It could be that you only see people seeking what you have on you, so perhaps I just don't know how this works.