Why are Crowns shared between servers when literally nothing else is?

heaven13

Acrolas wrote: »

It wouldn't be fair to give some players more purchasing power than others. If you buy 1500 crowns, you get 1500 crowns to spend.

And then there's the side issue of how you would feel if there were a very large accumulated balance of crowns on a server you never want to use. Inevitably there would be threads and tickets asking to transfer the unspent crown balance to the preferred server. But it was never intended to work like that. Buying 1500 isn't supposed to give you 3000.

This actually (kind of) makes sense and I could see it becoming an issue if it did indeed work like that. But it would be preferable to just have anything purchased with crowns applied to both servers.

UrQuan

There are certain things that are maintained at the account level, and certain things that are maintained at the server level (as well as certain things that are maintained at the character level, but that's not super relevant to this discussion).

Anything purchased with real world currency is maintained at the account level. That includes your wallet of crowns, and any chapters/DLC bundles/ESO+ subscriptions/pets that you bought with real world currency external to the game. Or that you got an external game code for. All of those things apply to both megaservers, because they're at the account level, which can be considered a parent to the server level.

Anything purchased from the crown store in-game is maintained at the server level (or, in a handful of cases like skill lines, at the character level).

With the way things work currently, when you buy crowns a credit transaction is applied to your crown wallet at the account level, and when you make a crown store purchase whatever you buy is applied at the server level, and a debit transaction is applied to your crown wallet at the account level.

To have the crowns apply to both megaservers, that would need to be reconfigured so that there was a crown wallet at the server level instead of at the account level, and when you purchased crowns it would simultaneously apply a credit transaction to your crown wallet on each megaserver.

From a technical standpoint, that shouldn't be any more complex than the current setup (if it had been set up that way initially, anyway). Really the only drawbacks I see to it are that when you logged on to the ESO website you wouldn't be able to see your crown balance (as it would no longer be at the account level, and it would probably require a decent amount of work to build an interface that would allow anything at the server level to be visible to you on the website, since there isn't currently anything that allows that), and what @Acrolas mentioned about how some people would look at their crown balance on the server that they don't play on, and try to get it transferred to the other server.

Also, of course, ZOS gets some benefit from the current setup in that people who play on both megaservers have to buy extra crowns if they want to make crown store purchases on both servers. To be honest, I doubt that's a significant factor, though, because most people either only ever play on one megaserver, or play mainly on one and don't play enough on the other for them to actually buy extra crowns to make crown store purchases on both. Sure, some will, but I'd bet that the number who do are just a drop in the bucket.

So it could be changed, and IMO the drawbacks to changing it would be minor enough to not be too much of a concern, but it would require development and testing effort that probably isn't justified, considering that dev effort could be applied to more pressing issues (I think the dev and testing effort would be significant, because if they were to make a change like this it would be potentially disastrous if something broke, so they'd have to really cross their Ts and dot their Is to make sure that it was perfect before rolling it out).

Also, total sidenote: @heaven13 I just read your signature and realized that I've only ever seen a couple of your characters - most of those names aren't familiar to me! lol

Katahdin

Cause $$$$$

Hallothiel

I haven’t been on my NA log in for a while but pretty sure my ESO+ is across both servers.

So not just crowns then. Is as @UrQuan explained above.

nafensoriel

Zulera301 wrote: »

Title says it all really, unless it's just a $greed$ issue. if by chance I play on both servers (not that I would at this point, but I used to in the past), I'd have to pay double the price just to outfit my account with the same goodies on both servers.
and yet, I can't transfer any of my characters, gold, achievements, etc between servers, so why are crowns and ONLY crowns shared between servers?
It's just never made sense to me unless my initial theory is actually true.

It's hilarious at the people thinking its profit-based.

I can use my single ACCOUNT to have both a EUPC and NAPC character.
Crowns are ACCOUNT based. Everything else is SERVER BASED because it's stored AT THE SERVER.

Honestly business-wise it would be a risk to your customers to have anything but crowns be account-based. If they tied crowns to servers you would have to beef up the security on the servers since they now would be directly touching a money system.

I don't know about you.. but I don't want my money and my game to touch each other except in the broadest possible way.
Conversely, you don't want your stuff stored account-based because you now open up your money to the game server or stupidly increase costs that you have to pass on to your consumers.

apri

I appreciated your posting a lot, @UrQuan, but I am not so sure about this:

UrQuan wrote: »

Also, of course, ZOS gets some benefit from the current setup in that people who play on both megaservers have to buy extra crowns if they want to make crown store purchases on both servers. To be honest, I doubt that's a significant factor, though, because most people either only ever play on one megaserver, or play mainly on one and don't play enough on the other for them to actually buy extra crowns to make crown store purchases on both. Sure, some will, but I'd bet that the number who do are just a drop in the bucket.

While it's probably true that playing both servers equally active, there are also people who totally move to another server. They have to rebuy everything which certainly is something ZOS is not too upset about.

JumpmanLane

It would be a HUGE problem if crowns WERE NOT shared between servers...So, the fact that they ARE is nothing to complain about really.

Goregrinder

Because some of us have to pay for all the free loaders logging everyday.