Money & Crafting/Gathering

[Malacite]

Just gonna copy & paste the thread I made over @ BG. Right now I feel this is my biggest issue with the game, and I imagine it is for many others as well.

Money & Crafting/Gathering

Is anyone else absolutely just frustrated like I am?


My crafting and gathering classes are leveling up smoothly enough, however the real issue is in making any sort of real profits out of my ventures. The market wards are all fine and dandy, but I preferred the stability and reliability of the AH in 11.

Go to the AH, look at the price history, and then list my wares accordingly. Well, that's all pretty much gone. I have no idea what's a "normal" rate for anything I'm currently carrying or have made, especially when NPC prices for basic materials are grossly inflated.

Example: Maple Log is like 2k from NPC vendor, but a single piece of Lumber sells for about 90 gil to NPCs. Okay then, so what the hell do I do then? Keep processing lumber and hope someone wants to buy it? I sure as hell can't sell logs at that rate, not when it's far cheaper to go out and harvest them.



I don't really fancy going through every single bazar in the wards either to get a feel of everyone else's rates. So basically, I'm not sure if I should just NPC everything I gather and synth for now, or horde it away on my Retainer until some kind of standards are set.

Currently at: 8 Smithing, 8 Woodworking, 3 Clothcraft, 7 Botany and 4 Mining.

[israel165]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

As much of a pain as it would be, get a list of ALL items and how much they sell to NPCs for and make a standard list on the internet somewhere for everyone to go by. Make our own AH-like system.

[Aeni]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

Never had problems in beta. You should know what the NPC sells them for and then sell it for less than that. Best places is to sell it at the guild. You bazaar (afk) near the NPC in the guild selling the items there and I guarantee that you'll do better than just being at some random location.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

Oh good lord the retainer areas are insane! We spent an hour and a half looking for a gosh darn shield!

[Malacite]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

Yeah that's exactly the dilema I had with Gladiator in OB TGM.

It would be nice if your Retainer could put up signs or something (instead of just leasing a stand that does nothing but look cool) to indicate visually what type of wares you have for sale.

I'd still rather have a full-blown AH back, but it looks like SE has done the market stuff on purpose to combat RMT. Until things get sorted out I'm just stashing my crafting materials on my retainer and leveling up my crafts through guildleve. I don't even know what to synth for money, only for skill at this point. Gah, it's gonna be months before any kind of stability sets in.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

Ok, you know how there are a bunch of different areas where retainers are located? Well each area has 2 marketplace rooms connected by a room in the middle. I take it that you can't put your retainer in the middle room because no one has any there. In the middle room is a billboard that you can not target or read but it has sheets of paper on it like announcements. Why don't they make that board like an aetheryte? Be able to stand by it, open your menu, it will have an option and then you could get a page with tabs that lists the items available for that area and the name of the retainer that has it. Yes, it would not be perfect because as you are looking someone could buy what you wanted, blah blah blah but MY GOD it would be better than the way it is now!

There has to be some way to make it easier to find items being sold by people. You know what is going to come next? People selling stuff are going to start shouting what they have for sale...like the hot items people are looking for. Shields are a biggie right now for nub glads and soon you'll be seeing "SQUARE OAK SHIELD 20,000 GIL...RETAINER: PETESSTORE!" Oh the spam will be awesome. Or people going "NEED SQUARE OAK SHIELD! NEED SQUARE OAK SHIELD!" Either way its going to suck but something needs to be done to find the shit you want in a REASONABLE amount of time.

[Jarre]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

I've also found that these areas have a limited number of retainers allowed, when I wanted to put mine in their, I had to select the 3rd marketplace in the list as the first 2 were full.

[wrongfeifong]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

the system is set, i don't think SE will do much at this point.

However, I can see SE make a website like FFXI-AH.com and have players list the items on sell and location of retainer

with a search button

[Malacite]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

It's not just the time it takes to sort through Bazaars, but without an AH there really is no set standards for goods.

This is what really pisses me off most, as I have no fucking clue what to price anything at, so I just basically dumped a bunch of items into my retainer's bazaar at what I figured was a fair rate, for some items going off of NPC rates when applicable.


I also managed to sell about 24 pieces of Maple Lumber out of my own bazaar while I was AFK earlier at 300 a piece so that was cool. Those logs are either 1k or 2k at NPC I forget... if 2k then well I lost a little I guess but if 1k that's a good profit (I got them while logging so I made money regardless but you now you know what I"m getting at here)


I liked having a price history and a centralized shopping area. The wards are an absolute cluster fuck, and there's actually a limit on them too! I tried putting my retainer in the 1st ward in LL but it was full! If SE has any sense, they'll bring back the AH (they said they would if enough people demanded it, along with mog houses). My retainer's inventory is already maxed out too, with my own sitting around 35. There's just too much junk to manage, and it's hard to unload it with this current system we have.

I really, really don't like it. I"m also worried about what's going to happen down the road if SE doesn't start imposing skill caps. As much as that will suck, it's going to be required lest we end up with a few players with max skill in every craft. Yeah, just imagine the kind of damage that would do to the market with 1 player having that much economic power.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

Yes, this system needs tweaking. If there was a central list of what the retainers had on them, price, and retainers name in each area it would help immensely. Then you'd also be able to gauge at what to sell things at sorta.

[Grizzlebeard]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

The current system is ridiculously archaic. Everquest used this back in 1999 but in 2001 they recognised how painful this was and introduced a specific area to put your vendors up and implemented a search function which listed all vendors and items for sale. I really can't understand why S-E reverted back to a dated 11 year old mechanic other than to waste more of the players' time.

One of the biggest flaws with this system is someone who literally plays around the clock, namely RMT and no-lifers, can constantly review the sale prices afk and logged players have set and adjust theirs accordingly to ensure fast sales. Your average Joe coming back from work is going to find his retainer still full of crap and faced with the prospect of adventuring on his main and having to drop items because of full inventory or to spend a few hours going through all the retainers and reviewing his sale prices in the hope of shifting his wares. That sounds like amazing fun right there.

[Balfree]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

I don't see why it was so hard to just do a bulletin system.. you could still have a "retainer", it just didnt need to be an actual character, just a slot in a sales bulletin. You just access the bulletin boards scattered all over town, then you get a browsable list of items or player names, with a search box to input the item name. Later adding filters, "one-handed swords within 2000~5000 gil, rank 1-7..."

Done deal.

I know that SE did this to prevent initial market saturation and prevent trends to form before a certain time has passed, the system they have now doesn't fully prevent it though, just makes it take longer because people simply take longer to find their stuff...

[Firewind]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

To be honest Phantasy Star Universe had this and it was a monumental pain the the arse until Sega introduced a search function so you could actually properly gauge prices.

The wards system wasn't that bad in Closed beta due to there only being a few hundred players per server (and the fact that shields vendored for like >1000 gil) and in Open Beta it was a mire but manageable due to there only being a thousand people per server. In the current version it's just a nightmare, especially when mass farming leves gives you a ton of gil, which in turn will cause rampant inflation since it's currently the only reliable way of making gil.

[Freelancer]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

Meh I'm playing with a good IRL friend of mine.

I do leather/cloth/armor
He does smith/alch/wood

And each makes junk the other needs, and it works nicely though leveling 3 crafts at once is a bitch but it works.


Tonight I'll start making harnesses and shields hopefully.

[DakAttack]

Re: Money & Crafting/Gathering

It is sort of a pain in the ass to find anything. I shout to see if anybody is selling anything I need, but I never get a reply. I'm not even sure where to go to find popular market areas.

Crafting is fun, but it's obvious when your level is too low. You'll fail every synth, each deducting 30 points from durability, and even successes will deduct about 10-15. I had once almost completed a synth that was obviously too high for me, where every synth was successful and yet I didn't have enough durability to make it to 100% progress. Crazy.