Fake Bazaar Listings

I have encountered on many Rare/Ex item pages Bazaar listings. It seems like RMT/Mercs are abusing that site feature in order to advertise their services on the item page itself. Any chance of fixing this bug or otherwise fixing the people who continue to misuse it for personal gain?

While I can respect your desire to not support RMT, there are many legitimate players who enjoy merc'ing because it allows them to earn gil in game by doing content vs mindless farming, and some players who mostly live a solitary life on game have access to gear from fights they couldn't normally do.

I'm not trying to say that all mercs have a conscience, only that they're not all heartless. There is some benefit to viable merc options, and being able to list your asking price here is something many players in today's game appreciate.

This is a feature, not a bug. Please close this work item.

You had me at:



...and since you're likely the kind of "great detective" that thinks they have found RMT activity when they see random items being sold for tens, hundreds, or 999 million gil, please be aware that this is hardly RMT activity anymore.

I have many alts/mules that I leveled for free monthly goodies (in addition to the fact that I enjoy playing the story line through) and sometimes my alts get lucky one items dropping from trove that are worth hundreds of millions on my server. These are alts on the same account and I have to move the money to my main somehow so I find a random item that never sells, list it for 1 gil, log quick, and buy it from myself for hundreds of millions.

If even I have to move money this way, I'm sure many many others do. The 999,999,999 gil cap is silly (and I'm capped in the Mog Garden strongbox or whatever it's called) and sometimes people cap out and have to d-box themselves their own gil in 999m chunks. It's just how it works. Gil is NOT hard to come by anymore for many people.

The purpose of this site is to inform players about the current state of the economy. It can't do that without reflecting the reality of it as much as is reasonable.

I've legit considered adding a "merc" tab that would work similar to the bazaar function but in addition to items, would allow zone entries or even individual monsters, but it's lower priority than other fixes.

(Having an open, free market for that stuff would probably lower prices for content due to competition and clearly marked prices, so merc groups may not be that enthusiastic about that feature.)

That's actually a pretty good idea.

Is there a way to make a sub-forum for Merc stuff? Instead of having the person make a merc thread on the server itself? So we all know what the going rate across all servers are, instead of having to search each individual server sub-forum.

If nothing else, the result of that would let those who still get bothered by this type of gameplay to steer clear of it, and for those interested, a unified place to find the info they need.

I'd agree though, Rooks- I get why your focus is placed elsewhere :)

I mean the real problem right now is that I don't have spare cycles for any AH work other than immediate repairs like the GW shout thing this morning. Once this new client gets settled into a normal workflow I'll have more time.

we're not in college any more, are we? Got real stuff to do nowadays ^^

Well some of us are college professors D:

(not me)

Work? Ha!

Welcome to FFXIAH.com, this is a feature that has been available for quite some time. It's only as useful as you allow it to be but most people find it pretty useful, including myself. People used to use it a lot more earlier in the game when items weren't as abundant as they are now. Maybe you really wanted a Cursed Hauberk -1, and they were never on the AH. I used to browse through items that people were looking for just so I could farm it to make some gil. Not sure why this is such an issue to you?

Do you also get upset about people that put items in their bazaar for an exorbitant price which causes FFXIAH to show said prices to the right of those "Rare/Ex" items?

I appreciate the reply. Knowing this, and also that your time to work on the site is limited, I can accept that there might be obvious Merc listings in the Bazaar where there should not be. That is reasonable.

I am a newer player and whether it is other players or RMT (it doesn't actually matter which to me), I didn't think that it belonged on the item pages under the Bazaar header when it was not a Bazaarable item, so I posted a bug report. I am aware of the dedicated threads with price listings for Mercenary services that are maintained. I did not understand why some users were also advertising on item pages in the way that I mentioned.

It might be fair to say that my lack of understanding of the state of things is palpable.

I would suggest you not think of those listings as "where they should not be" just because the concept of selling rare/ex drops is foreign to you- it is a very different world if you've been gone several years.

Again, the line between RMT who are only playing the game to exchange fake money for real money and the players who are using the tactics of RMT but are doing so to raise gil in order to better their actual characters is very fuzzy at times. And it makes sense if you look at it- why NOT copy the actions of those who found a way to make a business out of it, because they're going to be most concerned about the most efficient return on time.

The mercs are just skipping the last step of actually selling gil or items for real money, and keeping it in game, buying the work of farmers and crafters. To me, that's a VERY important difference.

Damnit I knew I forgot something

Eh, no worries. Hopefully now you've got a better idea of why things are as they are. Open discussion about this sort of thing is always welcome, and the "right" answer can always change.


I actually ought to filter that stuff.


FFXI has really been about six different games over its lifespan, which is kind of crazy to me.

I mean, for most of those things it was real players that did it first, only for RMT to copy the methods and expand them (via multiple characters before that was common, automation, and 24/7 playing).

Gil-making is gil-making, and while it was less common than it is now, there were people selling stuff like abjurations, merits, teleports, etc. all the way back in 2003.