Here at MMO Fallout, I try to offer my help to companies more in the form of business decisions, rather than what I might feel that the game needs. I only play a handful of MMOs, and honestly am not the best person to go to in order to find out what your game needs tweaking. Sure, I know that All Points Bulletin needs better shooting and driving, and I know that Blizzard needs to severely crack down on mobile authenticators being used as a free way to manipulate stolen accounts, but I couldn’t tell you how the latest expansion affected drop rates in Lineage 2, or how players in Guild Wars might react if a certain update was implemented.
Absolutely Brilliant! is a new category devoted to people clearly smarter than myself. In this section, I highlight ideas that, even if the company the game is directed at won’t take notice, other companies with similar models could definitely benefit from grabbing up this person’s idea.
Final Fantasy XIV goes into open beta soon, and the closed beta members are throwing suggestions left and right. Our first idea comes from MMORPG.com user ProfRed, who has an idea to make the market system a lot more streamlined. Seeing as how Square Enix is not gracing Final Fantasy XIV with an auction house (at least not for now), players are trying to find new ways to make the retainer system (a character who sits in market areas selling your items for you) as easy to use as possible. Rather than just a simple search engine, ProfRed (or The Professor, as I’ve taken to calling him) suggested:
“They simply need to add a way to browse items in one of the market wards. Say search for an item and it lists what market wards it exists in. Not even prices just where. Something akin to standing at the entrance and yelling, “I NEED A PINK MAGE HAT OF DOOM”, and vendors yelling back, “GET IT HERE!!!”.
Personal trade/merchanting is a great thing. I am sick of MMO’s making everything easy mode and catering to the anti social.”
Having a system like this would be a little shaky at the start, having to type the name of the item out exactly, but if Square Enix would implement this, such a system would do wonders more than some of the other suggestions (holding up signs, descriptions above names, etc), be less cumbersome if only the player speaking could see the feedback, and would remove the prospect of walking through a thousand retainers looking for your pink mage hat of doom, the idea of which sends me back to my years of playing games like ROSE Online, and the myriad of other free Korean games, most of which featured some form of private shop.
So that’s episode 1 of Absolutely Brilliant! For the record, I won’t be accepting direct submissions by email to this category, but if you see someone’s idea on a forum feel free to link me to it, either here or through my email. Special thanks to ProfRed, and all of the people who will eventually spite me for indirectly associating them with this webiste.
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