Fortunes could be won or lost. Lives could be torn apart by a single accidental bid. Whole Tarus could be lost in the myriad of items available for anonymous purchase.
It was unlike anything I've seen in any other game I've played before or since.
The way it works is when you sell an item, you put up a price you want to get. The purchaser would then enter an amount they wish to spend. Let's say you put up a crystal for 2,000g. If someone bids 2,000g, they would buy your crystal. However, if they bid say, 2,500g, they would buy your crystal for more than you originally listed. If there were multiple of the same items up for sale, the ones with the lowest list price would be bought first. So, if you put up the crystal for 2,000g, someone put up a crystal for 2,001g, and someone bid 2,500g, yours would be sold first for 2,500g.
Are you following me so far?
The only way to know the value of an item was to check the price history and see what the last 10 or so were sold for. The prices of current sales weren't up like they are in FFXIV, so you would blindly bid, trying to get the lowest price for what you wanted. Naturally, there were people who would put up items for 1g in the hopes of them selling quick, but that also comes with the risk of people bidding extremely low.
It was just complex enough to be amazing.
In the beginning, there were Auction Houses for each of the nations, Bastok, Windurst, San d'Oria *coughfaggotscough*, Jeuno, and to a lesser extent, Kazham, Norg, and Rabao, which no one ever went to unless they were desperate or retarded. Each had separate listings for items. For example, some items were expensive in Bastok, but cheaper in Windurst where they might be readily available. This made it extremely tedious to price match to try and save money.
It wasn't until the later years of XI that they decided to combine all the Auction Houses so there would be no more running around.
Fuckin' pansies.
Because of this, a lot of really old price history sales were lost.
However, right before the Auction House merge, I decided to snag a few little screenshots of items friends of mine and I had listed in the very early years before they were gone forever.
Take a peek into history:
Oh my! It seems I sold that item to myself for 69g! What a rapscallion I was back then. I'm not sure how my friend Darios and I got these pants, because this was back when they first released the set, so everything was mega expensive and hard to find. But we did it somehow.
There's the boots that Darios sold to himself for 1g.
Another Darios post. I guess 777 is more evil than Satan?
I remember having to promise Cayerik I would give him his money back after he bought this. Look at that date. November 22, 2004. Jeezy Creezy.
And once again, Darios snuck in the listing. Cheeky samurai.
There was also another listing I was very proud of that I was unable to get a screenshot before the merge. On my first trip to Kazham, I purchased Royal Knights Mufflers for my soon-to-be samurai for 10,000g that I borrowed from my good friend Alana. I remained the only person to ever buy them on the Kazham auction house until the merge took place, with a sell date earlier than the one pictured above.
Time flies, man. Time flies.
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