Already Pending Suggestions

1. Can you have the site email me or alert me in some way when ________ sells, or ______ is available, or _______ happens?

We have not yet implemented any sort of email or other notification system mainly due to concerns about bandwidth costs, and potential hostile exploitation/Denial of Service possibilities related to the feature. While still on the table, notifications for object sale, availability, etc, is very back-burner.

2. Could you add a feature to "favorite" certain items so I can quickly check all their prices in a single convenient location?

This feature already exists. It's called Item Sets and is over on the Members Menu for registered/verified users.

There is a similar feature for tracking groups of favorited players, called Player Sets.

3. Can you add _________ to the synth page? What about listing a cross-reference of ________ next to entries?

Our FAQ explains much of our take on suggestions like this. We are currently very hesitant to add any more cross-listings, sorting options, or features on the synth page for "convenience," as we do have to be genuinely concerned about making the site too powerful. The ffxiah.com staff is very concerned about overall game balance and health, and we tend to error on the side of not implementing a particular feature if we feel it would provide too much of an advantage to our users.

This includes suggestions about creating more complicated and specialized profit/loss formulas for certain items with specific sales patterns or rates. We feel there has to be some effort involved with trying to make a buck through synthing, beyond simply clicking the actual crystal.

4. Could you make the site include NPC item prices in its profit/loss calculations, or on individual item pages?

FFXIAH.com is committed to only providing data that can be independently verified through automatic data collection. There is currently no way to compile an automated list of NPC item prices. Other sites that list NPC prices for items rely on user-submitted data and are therefore too unreliable for us to use.

Complicating matters is that NPC prices are determined by nation standing, fame levels, and even conquest system availability. As such, there is no way for us to include reliable NPC item costs or availability in our site's automated calculations.

5. Could you make the site include other auction houses like San d'Oria, Windurst, and Bastok?

Because each auction house has the same total number of listable items, the fact that they have relatively less transaction volume doesn't help us. Each additional auction house would require the same amount of database, scripting, and bandwidth overhead. Adding the other three auction houses, therefore, would quadruple our current operating costs while providing relatively little benefit to our users, which would quickly put the site out of business.

6. What about including auction house fees in the price total?

As the formula for computing fees for auction houses varies wildly depending on which Jeuno-linked city you're in, in addition to the sales/purchase price tiers of the item in question, this wouldn't be useful or accurate enough to implement.

7. Could you provide a way for us to embed our sales, equipment, or other profile info on our own websites/forums?

We are debating a way to provide some sort of open Data API to 3rd party sites, including player and item lists. This would mean that other users could access limited parts of our data, including profile or sales info, xNM and item lists, etc, and embed it on their own websites. However, this could rapidly spiral our server costs out of control, meaning that such a feature would likely be subscription-based. As writing a reliable and secure subscription system is a significant amount of work, the implementation of such a service would be many months in the future, if ever.

Displaying your automatically generated equipment box on another site, however, is already possible. The script code to put on your site is:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.ffxiah.com/widget.php?q=equip&server=Lakshmi&name=Jaerik"></script>

Replace server and name with your own character, of course. Note that some forums may disable embedded script or HTML in their posts.

8. Can you include quests? How about events?

By and large, our take at ffxiah.com is thus: our strength is our completely automated collection of data. Our users generally feel that they can trust our data because it's collected in such a way that human error never enters into the equation. We are very hesitant to expand the site such that it would require any human to manually enter data in any way, whether that be adding new quests as they come out, or including temporary in-game events. There are plenty of existing FF-related information sites that provide this service already, and we freely link to them from our site when appropriate.

9. Could you build in more price-fixer or RMT-identifying features?

We are always open to suggestions on how to accomplish this, as we do not condone RMT in any way. We actually believe one of the most interesting uses for our site is to help track RMT. However, similar to #5 above, such a service would have to be done entirely automatically, and could not rely on user-submitted information of any kind. Accusing another player of RMT and potentially destroying their reputation is a very serious thing -- any feature we provide for this would have to be absolutely bulletproof to never, ever mis-identify a user or character as RMT. There also may be many legitimate uses of the auction house that may resemble price-fixing or RMT transactions. So far, we have not figured out any way to do this with absolute reliability, and so while we are still open to suggestions on a way to accomplish this, such a feature has been tabled for now.