FFXIV needs an AH at launch.Follow

Yes, an AH will affect the economy, in the same way that wheels affect a vehicle's speed. As in, it doesn't have any without them.

Yes, there will be RMT. The solution is to get rid of them as they pop up, not remove a good system because it could be abused. Murderers and rapists use cars to transport victims and these cars have wheels, the solution is to arrest the murderers and rapists, not to sell cars without wheels.

Yes, people like to bazaar goods. But the notion that people should have to spend hours a day looking for items because of the abysmal lag in the market wards while tabbing through 50-100 retainers selling a hodgepodge of goods at varied prices is an abysmal one. If this game is supposed to be aimed at a playerbase who doesn't have a lot of time to log on, why should the game waste hours of their already short playtime just for them to buy or sell one single item?

Fact: An MMORPG's biggest influx of players is almost always its retail release. Yes, an MMORPG tends to have a lot of bugs at release that need to be worked out, and yes, some people will quit and never come back because of these bugs. That's life. Why wouldn't you want to put your best foot forward though? Why would you want to leave out a feature that is practically mandatory in any MMORPG that has come out in the past 10 years? A feature that, if missing, will drive thousands of players away and scare thousands more from ever trying your game?

I'm not going to make this post about making the game easier or making it intuitive or putting exclamation points over peoples' heads, I'm merely stating a simple fact:

FFXI lives and dies by its auction house. Don't believe me? Ask any FFXI player how many of them use the AH at least daily. Sometimes several times a day. Removing that AH from FFXI would thoroughly cripple the game. It would kill it.

So why shouldn't a feature that is integral to the game's success-nay, its basic functionality-be included?

To be clear: I'm not saying "Hey, you guys really need to think about adding it", I'm not saying "It should be added eventually", I'm saying it -needs- to be added -at launch-.

Afraid of RMT? Ban them. That's what the STF is for. The solution to RMT is not to make your players waste hours trying to buy items. Have you ever considered that since you're making it a chore to buy items, that some of the more impatient players will buy the gil so that they can just purchase the first item they see at whatever price and move on with their life? That decentralized trade will actually result in RMT -thriving- in the game because with the amount of time it takes to make one simple sale or one simple purchase, some less scrupulous players would rather just buy the gil, since earning it and spending it wisely is intentionally being made to be a chore?

Don't sell us a car without wheels just because you're worried it might go somewhere. We -want- it to go somewhere. That's the whole reason we're buying the car.

Please implement an Auction House -at launch-.

I agree, 100%. Have to say I loved the car analogy! While not having an AH isn't going to cause me to cancel my preorder, I can guarantee you they won't be seeing my $12.95/mo until something is done. Until then, FFXIV can sit on the shelf. Funny thing is, I bet the AH is already coded and ready (they're already IN the game, with the AH symbol on the buildings!), just like the hardware mouse was, and all they have to do is flip a little switch in the coding and boom, you have an AH. Just do it, SE ... lazy bastards.

Your retainer idea isn't working, there are ALREADY gilsellers in the beta, just give us an AH and make STF do their damn jobs. Have a nice day!

Edit: Also wanted to point out, that if the server goes down for maintenance, the retainers just ... leave. Then you have to log back in and resummon them so they can start bazaaring for you. Guess what that doesn't happen with ... oh right, an AH. AH +100 / Retainers -9001

Edited, Sep 6th 2010 8:12pm by lolrockboy

As I mentioned in another post, there currently is no feasible way to trade in FFXIV. There is no AH, and the retainers system is unusable.

With no trade, it may limit RMT, but only because gil will be pointless. It may even encourage RMT, because if the gilsellers instead sold items, it might be easier to buy from them that try to find the item in game.

It doesn't necessarily need an AH, but it needs something, or the economy is dead in the water.

Signed. Auction Houses, YES PLEASE!

It just makes too much sense not to have. RMT will always find ways to screw things up, no matter what the system is. Things can be done to make a auction house efficient and to deter price manipulation, they just need to add some new systems into it and make it more like Aion's Auction house instead of FFXI's (one of the few things Aion did right). Basically, you click on a item, it shows you all the ones that are for sale, for how much and by who. There's all kinds of things like this that can be done. Also, as others have said in the past and I'll say again, even if the retainer system remained how it is it can be abused and manipulated in more ways than one, and yes believe it or not bots can be built and will be built to abuse it.

Beautifully said. Agreed 100%

Sadly that's an even worse solution than the retainers system.

In my time trading in FFXI I did do some by talking to people. This was generally for special requests such as unusual items or bulk purchases. In most of these cases people found me by seeing my name in the auction house history.

These cases were some of the most interesting trades I did.

However, it just doesn't work for normal crafting. If you want to buy directly, all of the following (and more) must be true: 1) you know who to talk to, 2) they are on-line at the time, 3) they are ready to do the crafting or have items on hand, 4) they can get the materials they need.

Particularly with the increased cross-craft requirements, it would simply take far too long to get hold of the raw materials needed.

If it is harder to get materials from other players than to just farm them yourself, then trade won't happen. In that case you might as well be playing a single player game.

Was that really their reasoning behind not having a centralized AH system - to deter... RMT???!!!!!

This has gone too far. If your goal is to frustrate your players to the point where they all /ragequit thus destroying the RMT's target market and ending their existence, well jolly good show then! Because that's what will happen. I can already see how the reviews of this game are going to go once the media gets hold of it:

The Good: Stunning landscapes, extreme attention to detail, fluid movements and good gamepad support.

The Bad: Confusing leveling system, long cooldowns, no meaningful trade system, laggy and difficult to use menus, no hardware mouse, crafting is a mystery, equipment is difficult to maintain, inability to change many settings from within the game itself - pretty much everything else about the game is virtually unplayable. It would seem that history is about to repeat itself, with Square Enix's latest installment into the Final Fantasy series.

Let's check back next month and see, because that's what it will take before SE changes anything in their "vision". We've all seen it before - nothing changes until the magazines nut up and tell it like it is. Then all of a sudden, the "Square Enix Community" checks in at Zam, they release some kind of HR-approved post, and all the fanboys +1 in the thread telling SE what a great job they are doing, thanks for the post, keep it up! And then we don't see them again until the next catastrophe.

Well, at least they are consistent. Still, it's sad that bad press is what it takes to illicit a response out of them.

Edited, Sep 7th 2010 6:12pm by Torrence

I'm worried that the current systems will actually encourage RMT: all it would take is an RMT company to sell items not gil for real money, and you'll get players using them because it's easier than trying to find items from retainers.

Lol i took my first venture into the market wards today. I was looking for some weapons, or new armor. Sure enough I looked through about 100 retainers all of which were selling stuff like bee hive chips, formic acid, apples, oranges, wood, ore. All junk crap that i could care less about. I found ONE person selling armor out of like 100. The rest were selling bare minimum crafting ingredients.

I think the retainer system could work just fine, just as long as it had a search function where you could search for armor and weapons and such. Then the search engine just tells you the name of the retainer, and the ward. Simple. No need for an auctionhouse if they implemented that.

Edited, Sep 8th 2010 8:21am by Soezu

That could be in the search engine too. The retainers could basically work like an auction house almost exactly. But you'd have to go to the right zone and the right vendor to actually buy it. Also the search function would not show prices. But yeah you could say search for all level 40+ Bows...It would show a list of all the 40+ bows in the market wards, with names of the retainers holding them, and names of the actual ward they are in. So the only difference really would be that instead of buying it off the AH and going to the mailbox to actually get the item, you would search it, then have to goto the NPC that has it to buy it. If 2-3 have what you want, you'd have to "shop". But i would have no problem searching 2 or 3 retainers as opposed to hundreds.

Personally i would make for an excellent economy. Not having a price history would force people to sell stuff for what they think it's worth. You wouldnt have RMT's purposely inflating the price of items. buying out all of 1 item and jacking the price up.

There's a lot of benefits to the retainer system people are overlooking simply because "it's not what i'm used to". I completely agree the way it is now is unacceptable. But I do see it working with a a lot of tweaking. Like I said, all it needs is a search function to search all items in the wards, not by name, but by the same way you search stuff on an AH.

All they need is a good search function. Not just search by keywords, that's not enough. A Market Ward search function that works the same as an AH search function. It should include categories and subcategories like these:

Weapons
-Swords
-Polearms
-Axes
-Wands
-Staves
-Hand-to-hand
-Thrown
Armor
-Cloth
-Leather
-Chain
-Plate
Consumables
-Potions
-Food
-Scrolls/etc
Reagents
-Blacksmithing
-Alchemy
-Culinary
-Goldsmithing
-Weaving
-And so on...

I think you get the point, even if I probably left some stuff out. It needs a kick-a$$ search system.

EDIT: Should also have Class Rank options, stat options, etc.



Edited, Sep 8th 2010 5:55pm by BRizzl3

Really even if they added a search system identical to the way you search in other games like Aion? Just for searching the Market Ward instead of an AH? It would be pretty much the same thing at that point.

I've personally tried to go into the Market Wards a couple of times, but as there are so many different wards to choose from, I pretty much have given up searching through them. Hopefully a search option will be implemented soon.

I'm here for the this needs an auction house party.

Havent sold anything in the market wards, I just vendor all my stuff now, its effecting my DoH profession a bit, but mostly effecting how much Gil I could be making, it is really driving the economy down. And all it will do is encourage structured economy driven linkshells for the Gilsellers to have an internal crafting network and sell not just Gil to people but items aswell.

I haven't even opened my retainer. Frankly, I can't be bothered to try to figure out their ridiculous system.

Things that people liked in FFXI shouldn't have been dumped in favor of more complicated bullsh*t in XIV.

I actually feel like i'm playing a single player game 95% of the time i play this game. People i run into and buff + heal don't talk and won't party. But, back on topic. The crafting system is just retarded. Why do rank 8 items take rank 20 mats to make? That's so ass backwards. Then there's repairing. Want to repair your own gear so it doesn't break as soon as ya leave town? Learn every...single...crafting...profession. Then keep every single tool in your inventory eating up your space. Ohh yea, then there's the mats. Gotta have mats to repair. So you gotta go buy those mats or make them taking up even more time. Yay. About a day or 2 worth of work just because you wanted to repair your own items. Cause gods knows you ain't gonna find someone who can repair your items while your randomly walking around killing the same mobs over and over. Then what happens when you get higher level items? Ohh gotta keep leveling that crafting! Even if you hate the crafting system.. you're basically forced to use it if you want to repair your own gear so you don't have to run back to town every hour or 2.

That's true, but AH's have also been in existence for quite a long time. In fact, when I was child I remember being taken to auctions and flea markets and malls, and none of them required multiple menus to get through.

All of that is irrelevent anyway, since this is a fantasy game and not Colonial America. There's no reason for there not to be a meaningful method of trade, and certainly no reason for them to regress into less streamlined systems.

I agree.

The bazaar system has already been tested in other MMOs like Phantasy Star Universe and I guess everybody who has played that know this system is useless. It's seriously a lot smarter to just grind and get a hold of items yourself than browse through HUNDREDS of shops.

SE should be proud of the system they created for XI as it's become a genre standard.

Same here.

I racked my brains trying to figure out an alternative to this retainer mess.

Every single thing I created in my feeble little mind was an auction house, or a spin-off of one.

The reason being, it works. It works really, really well.

Why on Earth did you change what was one of the fundamental parts of FFXI, while not changing things that should have been changed?

For the first bolded item, I have no issues. Granted my PC is pretty quick (Q6600 @ 3GHz, 8GB RAM, 5970). But still, no issues with the menus in the game so far.

For the second bolded item, it is? I find it quite easy to use. And quite a good crafting system. Gone is the completely random results of crafting from FFXI that would sometimes frustrate the hell out of you. You now have the ability to chose quality or just completing the item. It mirrors the crafting system in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes without the overcomplication that system suffered from with its "complications". I think it is one of the best crafting systems I've seen in an MMO. I enjoy that it isn't just gather mats, start synth, cross fingers.

For the third bolded item, was this way in FFXI. I personally don't mind. You'll quickly figure out what works and then never have to change it. So its only an issue for a day at most.

Oh and I agree there should be an auction house. Whatever the bad, the good outweighs it. As much as I like player interaction in games, leave that to relying on each other for grouping. Not just to buy an item. Buying and selling items should be a simple process. Not one that requires a ton of thought. I don't mind the leveling system. I think its interesting. Granted I'm sure theres flaws (saw a point about who wants to heal since you won't get XP).

Edited, Sep 13th 2010 11:00pm by Kuhaa

we need Action House.... please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The OP said it. Bravo.

Agreed. AH yes, please!

Don't worry, just pick the first ward on the list, that's where 99.9% of the retainers are (because really, the only way most people would search the wards is top-down, so why be in ward 20/20 if nobody's going to get to you unless they exhausted the other 19?).


Just had my first encounter with the market ward system last night. Wasted a whole lot of time looking for something that apparently nobody even had. There's no way I'd do that more than once, so I definitely agree that we need either an AH system or something that's basically the venerable AH (one-stop location to search for -- and hopefully purchase -- items we're interested in). When I want some items, I want to get them now, not in a few hours (or more) after searching many wards in multiple cities. :\ The current system pretty much guarantees that people /ragequit because they can't really buy much of anything, just never buy anything at all (good luck being rank 40 with rank 1 gear, I'm sure x.X), or set up small all-inclusive linkshells that are their own economy. None of the options benefit the overall game or community, and I can definitely see RMTs flourishing because of the sheer level of frustration people will have by not being able to easily purchase items.

While retainers are more "intimate", there's nothing easier than the old AH. Or if you want to stick with the retainers, simply have a "market counter" where we can search a city's wards for retainers that are selling an item we want (think AH interface but gives names, locations, and hopefully prices). Bonus points if we can purchase a specific item from a specific retainer from the counter (treated as if we purchased the item through the retainer itself).

It's not that I necessarily disagree with the consequences you cite, but I think your logic is slightly flawed.