Eorzean Escapades Part 5: Infrastructure, and Lack Thereof

Last time on Eorzean Escapades…

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We sat in one place for hours, earning bits of stuff we didn’t really know how to use! In this entry, I try to figure out how to use all that junk banging around in my inventory. In the process, I’ll explain the workings of Final Fantasy XIV’s economy, and how players try desperately to do something, anything, in the confines of the system.

So first things first – FFXIV does not have a standard auction house to drive and support a player-run economy. It doesn’t have much of anything, really, but we’ll get to that later. The economy is conducted under the noble stewardships of retainers. These are NPCs that you recruit to sit on items you want to sell, so other players can purchase them when you’re off killing monsters, crafting in one spot so long you wear a hole in the floor, or complaining loudly to your linkshell.

Look at him, so happy. Little does he know his life will soon be nothing but boredom and degradation. Being the consummate gentleman, I named my new vendor slave “Itembitch,” because that is what he is.

This retainer can be summoned from points in any city via small bells that are hard to find. In grand FFXIV fashion, the game doesn’t give you much info to work with in regards to where these bells are, how to use them, or why you’d even want to.

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Since FFXIV has a limited inventory, I’d mainly been using my retainer to hold items. After all, I have no idea which items are valuable and, more importantly, if I might need some of them in crafting on down the line. The more important implementation of retainers is in the game’s market wards. Note in the video below how confusing actually getting to the market ward is – you have to select “teleport” from a sub-menu while standing in the right place. I had to ask for help just to find the damn thing.

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This is where you, and all the other players, can summon and place their retainers, selling a set number of items at a set price.

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In this way players can buy and sell items at their leisure while enjoying the virtual act of browsing wares and hunting for a good deal. Sounds awesome, right? This is when I make a fart sound with my mouth, but it’s hard to convey that through text. There are huge problems with this system. The first is you have no efficient way of finding what the hell you’re looking for. Idly browsing inventories and finding a good deal on a weapon is a theoretically cool experience, but if you go into the market looking for a specific item, prepare to waste a crapload of time trying to find it (but then again, wasting time seems to be the point of the game).

The second problem is this system makes it very hard to establish a stable economy. Players have no idea what the going rates are for items without consulting third-party databases and websites that track that sort of information. For a noob like me, I may have items I could sell. However, I don’t know that I don’t need them, and I sure as shit don’t know what price to sell anything for. Is 100 gil a good price for formic acid? Is that five times what it should be?

Of course, these oversights are not exceptions to the rule of FFXIV design. Several functional omissions make the game more complicated to play than it needs to be. For instance, there’s no way to compare, side-by-side, gear you’re wearing with something else you may want to equip. You have to just memorize the numbers, back out, then pull up the item screen for the second item. There’s no way to send mail or items to other players without meeting them physically. Also, you can’t invite someone to your linkshell (chat group) without meeting them in-game.

The list goes on. Despite all the needless mechanical complexity to the game, it’s worth noting that none of them make the game unplayable – all they do is alter the amount of time you must invest to get the same output compared to other MMOs. In the case of the markets, you have to research market prices on a third-party database (which, incidentally, also allows players to enter their bazaar contents into a searchable database). In the case of linkshells, you just have to coordinate via IRC or Skype to meet up in-game.

At least the names are always hilarious.

By traditional judgement metrics, one would proclaim that this makes FFXIV objectively worse than other MMOs, but I don’t see it that way. Some players (you may be one of them) want to spend more time on some tasks, because it makes small victories more meaningful. In World of Warcraft or one of the many MMOs that imitate its design, I get new equipment within the first twenty minutes. In Final Fantasy XIV, I didn’t visually change at all until hour ten. Laughable to some, but damn did that bandanna look sexy. In WoW, anybody can hit the level cap and kill Kel’Thuzad with enough time. It takes dedication, commitment, and hard-wrought knowledge to do the equivalent in Final Fantasy XIV.

So, in a nutshell, that’s the market wards, and thus the economy of Final Fantasy XIV. While I didn’t want to include outside sources in this ongoing evaluation, it’s worth noting that Square has posted their first planned list of updates to the game, which include a lot of features that would improve this experience:

Search feature to allow item searches by individual wards

Icon display to identify retainers selling sought-after items

Increase in the number of retainers that may be employed

With these changes in place (and, of course, assuming they work correctly), the bazaar system could mature into a workable and, more importantly, unique way to manage a player-run economy. That doesn’t change the state of things now, however, which puts my sad Itembitch holding on to his one bottle of formic acid in a chaotic madhouse of disorganized commerce.

There, there, Itembitch. Check back next time for…

Progression, or the neverending grind!

Summary so far (18 hours played):

- No reliable way to take items to market

- No reliable way to buy new gear / items from players

- Got new gear though, lookin’ good

- Really, really want to go to a new area.