Friday the player [snip] bought a banker assistant for 4,400,000 gold, from a seller he met on a popular Discord server for crown trading, World Crown Exchange. Saturday he was banned for "engaging with a gold-selling account". He's a returning player, coming from a years long break. He's been playing since beta. This was his first time buying crowns.

Link to original post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1gv9i0z/banned_for_crownsgold_trading/

No human being seems to have reviewed his ticket, as he keeps getting automated responses, some of which are VERY incorrect, like the one accusing him of buying 22 mil gold, when he in fact bought 4k crowns with 4,4 mil gold. Or the one accusing him of cheating. It seems like the automated system couldn't even decide why it was banning him. Can a real human being please review this? @ZOS_Kevin, @ZOS_GinaBruno

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Banning people for unknowingly buying crowns from someone involved in RMT is... certainly a choice. I believe his account was automatically flagged because he is a returning player. So, inactive account suddenly becoming active and sending gold to a fraudulent account. I can see why the system would flag that. But this raises a series of concerns.

A new player coming to the game might not be able to tell a legitimate crown seller from a fraudulent one dealing with RMT. A returning player coming from a long break might remember a time when buying crowns was safe, and might not know about the RMT epidemic. A regular active player who has never bought crowns before might not be familiar with RMT and won't be able to tell an account is suspicious. I know I had to google what RMT means when crown gifting was disabled last year, and I had bought crowns with gold many times.

Now, to quote another user:

- Gold selling account asks for permission to be able to sell crowns.

- Customer support approves their account to sell crowns based on their new non-transparent criteria. In other words, it is completely at their discretion.

- You then trade crowns with the APPROVED ACCOUNT in a roundabout mailing system, because the developers have not provided a safe in game way to trade crowns for gold.

- The ZOS approved account in question is found to be selling gold against the Terms of Service.

- Finally, you are held at fault and banned for trading with the account they chose to approve.

Why even allow gifting crowns at all if, without a moment's notice, we can be banned for trusting ZOS's judgement that an account was safe and fit to gift? How are we players supposed to know the account ZOS approved was fraudulent?

Some people think a built in system for crown/gold trade similar to the one Guild Wars 2 has could help, but I have no experience with that game so I wouldn't know. I do know something needs to be done, though. Banning innocent players over a measly 4 mil gold for an assistant is not fair at all. Absolutely nothing about this decision "reflects the extent and scale of the violation".

[Edit for Naming and Shaming.]