Disabling crown gifting is a bad idea

Elsonso

luen79rwb17_ESO wrote: »

This is a major hit to ZOS' own incomes as well.

Nefas mentioned revenue in his video, and not for the first time. I agree that it is a major hit to revenue, and that is why I think they have seemingly bent over backwards to keep gifting running as long as they could. Once it was determined to be fraudulent behavior, they should have shut it all off. They should not have waited until now..

fluffybunny

IrisDupree wrote: »

This. Make it unpleasant and too much work for gold sellers and scammers. Account age, plus character level, plus cp level, plus friends list for x amount of time. Yeah would that suck for new players, sure. But at least they would know that after a certain amount of time they could trade and it also means people have to invest time in the game.
Gold sellers and credit card scammers are not going to bother to level and if they use bots to do it, then they will get caught. This also removes the desire for people to buy from them since they will have to friend them for months and I'd guess it'd be pretty easy for ZoS to figure out who is buying from scammers that way and boom both are banned.

What I just learned is that apparently people have been using VPNs to log into poorer countries where items in the crown store are much cheaper. If that is a major factor in this, then I really don’t see how gifting will ever come back. I know people who use VPNs to avoid ban evasions. So if ZOS can’t fix that, then I don’t know how they’ll figure this out. Obviously VPNs are a totally separate thing from ZOS.

Nefus brought up a good point where he said they may be bleeding a ton of money compared to what their projections are. In that case, wouldn’t they want to recuperate their losses? It doesn’t make sense to me, though, because if people didn’t have the money to buy crown store items before, it’s not like they will now.

Also I want to add I have no issue with crates being ungiftable due to the gambling thing and how little your chances are of getting the item(s) you want.

Ardan147

linlilia wrote: »

Make it so that you physically trade the crowns in the person trading window and move on. It gets you a nice log of what is being done and stops the players that "sell" crowns and then never send the item or get the item and never send the gold catastrophe that has been going since this whole thing started.

But even doing that still won't stop people from using stolen credit cards to buy crowns and trade them to other players (for real world money or gold that they then sell for real world money). It isn't just other players getting scammed, but ZOS themselves getting scammed. The account used for the fraudulent transactions will get banned when the charges are reversed, but by then the scammer/thief will have unloaded the fraudulently purchased crowns and just create a new account, wash, rinse, repeat.

Unfortunately any system that allows something bought with real world currency and that can be traded to another player is going to be vulnerable to this type of fraud.

boi_anachronism_

jaws343 wrote: »

Naftal wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

PrincessOfThieves wrote: »

Yeah. For me personally, being able to earn stuff in game is very important, and I spend a lot of time farming stuff I can sell (dungeon masks, writs and the like).
Without the ability to buy crown gifts, there will be no cosmetic goals to work towards and I will have significantly less motivation to play. The amount of cosmetics you can earn ingame is very limited, and some of them require insane feats such as trial trifectas.

Same with me, gridind for gold felt good because of the recompense of getting stuff from the crown store, now what's the point? The majority of my time playing was making gold, what am I supposed to do now? Just hoard a pile of useless fake currency?

You mean, play a video game...

Honestly, any outrage over this against ZOS is misplaced. Fraud is not good, and frankly, it is in ZOS' best interest to make sure their game doesn't allow for it.

They disabled the biggest gold sink in the game. I don't think you are thinking this through.

It's not a gold sink though. Gold sinks remove gold from players. All crown sales do is transfer gold around to other players.

And again, you are arguing in favor of fraud for some convenience in a video game.

Ah no. This has always been allowed. Why? Welp because someone is buying the crowns somewhere so zos still makes money. If anything this is gonna cut into their pockets reeeaaal fast because loads of people buy crowns just to trade them for gold. They wouldnt bother with them otherwise sooo uh good move zos.

Vulkunne

Zezin wrote: »

More and more it seems the game is doing everything it can to alienate the end game community, we have nothing to do with the gold we get at end game, now more than ever the pul to play something else grows bigger and bigger.

And so on this note I have a question. Now given how this has worked in the past I'm certain no one cares and I'm also certain this will be completely ignored because I have a habit of speaking my mind and c'mon, no one likes that.

@ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_GinaBruno

Question. Well a question and some feedback. While not completely surprised by this my mind is blown. I know for years certain voices have argued against Crown gifting and so forth but the problem I have is -not- necessarily with their opinion. Which I know ZOS only listens to certain folks, c'mon now let's all be honest. We mostly adults here.

But for those of us who are not with them, see, I never force myself or my way of thinking on anybody else. And, the more years go by I just fail to understand why an angry minority of people who feel disenfranchised seemingly have so much power to bend everyone else to their will. And again, make no mistake, there is alot of bitterness in the air now and before this happened. I am including the fraudsters in with this as well, because of their abuse, too, most of the community is going to have to suffer and my mind is blown that ZOS would allow something like this to happen to begin with.

I mean didn't you guys take away Jabs and Flurry animations proper? You took them away and replaced them with garbage. You took away DK wings and a bunch of other things but yet... it seems like you don't mind taking away the things we like but not focusing on the big things like issues with Crown Transaction abuse. Am I missing something here?

That said, here's my question. I'm done ranting, again no ones cares I know... I know.

Some of us have like a second account with Crowns on it. Now I need to send over some tokens from one account to another. I own both accounts and this is not part of any sales. When you did this, did anyone realize that in doing so we can no longer move Crown items between accounts? Would someone from ZOS please consider like a ticket or some special work around for those of us just need to move token to another account instead of buying the expensive things? Like I have a change name token and a race update I want to use and now am locked out of. (Note: I have not actually bought the tokens yet, I've got like a balance of 10.5k Crowns and want to gift these to myself.)

This post will not be popular and I understand the abuse regarding Crowns needs to end, to this we agree. However I suspect part of the problem is within mgmt of the game itself and it is my hope going forward you guys can tighten things up and not allow abusive people OR angry players to hold us all hostage because they don't like the way we play the game. Because that is not why I and many others are here and it is not something we want in our lives. ESO/ZOS or otherwise.

Carcamongus

This is a rather drastic measure. If we are to agree with ZOS, they should have been a tad bit more detailed in their explanation of the reason behind this move, the "fraudulent behavior". I'm genuinely curious to read their official description of this fraud (apologies in advance if that has already been posted).

I feel like something's left unsaid in all of this. First the crates, now the entire crown store. How big exactly is this fraud problem? Is it big enough to cause a company of ZOS's size to struggle to fix it? Should we be worried this is a sign of more problems that could affect the game's future?

PrincessOfThieves

fluffybunny wrote: »

IrisDupree wrote: »

This. Make it unpleasant and too much work for gold sellers and scammers. Account age, plus character level, plus cp level, plus friends list for x amount of time. Yeah would that suck for new players, sure. But at least they would know that after a certain amount of time they could trade and it also means people have to invest time in the game.
Gold sellers and credit card scammers are not going to bother to level and if they use bots to do it, then they will get caught. This also removes the desire for people to buy from them since they will have to friend them for months and I'd guess it'd be pretty easy for ZoS to figure out who is buying from scammers that way and boom both are banned.

What I just learned is that apparently people have been using VPNs to log into poorer countries where items in the crown store are much cheaper. If that is a major factor in this, then I really don’t see how gifting will ever come back. I know people who use VPNs to avoid ban evasions. So if ZOS can’t fix that, then I don’t know how they’ll figure this out. Obviously VPNs are a totally separate thing from ZOS.

Nefus brought up a good point where he said they may be bleeding a ton of money compared to what their projections are. In that case, wouldn’t they want to recuperate their losses? It doesn’t make sense to me, though, because if people didn’t have the money to buy crown store items before, it’s not like they will now.

Also I want to add I have no issue with crates being ungiftable due to the gambling thing and how little your chances are of getting the item(s) you want.

If they could block crown crates in Belgium, it shouldn't be a problem to block crown gifting for countries with regional pricing. So that people in these countries can still buy crowns for personal use, but not for sale.
Same with the other abuse methods, really. Just make it not worth the effort - like many people said, increase the account requirements for crown selling, put limits on new accounts etc.

Zyva

Its not a matter of if it CAN affect the games future, it already has. And will keep doing so.

How many people just consider this a huge slap in the face and will just move on to other things??

FireBreathingNord

It's indeed a complex issue, and fraudsters can find ways to exploit any system involving real-world currency and player-to-player trading. Game developers like ZOS face a continuous battle against such illicit activities to protect both players and their own resources. Implementing robust security measures and monitoring for suspicious transactions is essential, but it may never be entirely foolproof due to the adaptability of scammers. Finding a balance between player freedom and security can be quite challenging in online gaming environments.

jaws343

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Naftal wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

PrincessOfThieves wrote: »

Yeah. For me personally, being able to earn stuff in game is very important, and I spend a lot of time farming stuff I can sell (dungeon masks, writs and the like).
Without the ability to buy crown gifts, there will be no cosmetic goals to work towards and I will have significantly less motivation to play. The amount of cosmetics you can earn ingame is very limited, and some of them require insane feats such as trial trifectas.

Same with me, gridind for gold felt good because of the recompense of getting stuff from the crown store, now what's the point? The majority of my time playing was making gold, what am I supposed to do now? Just hoard a pile of useless fake currency?

You mean, play a video game...

Honestly, any outrage over this against ZOS is misplaced. Fraud is not good, and frankly, it is in ZOS' best interest to make sure their game doesn't allow for it.

They disabled the biggest gold sink in the game. I don't think you are thinking this through.

It's not a gold sink though. Gold sinks remove gold from players. All crown sales do is transfer gold around to other players.

And again, you are arguing in favor of fraud for some convenience in a video game.

Ah no. This has always been allowed. Why? Welp because someone is buying the crowns somewhere so zos still makes money. If anything this is gonna cut into their pockets reeeaaal fast because loads of people buy crowns just to trade them for gold. They wouldnt bother with them otherwise sooo uh good move zos.

To be clear, I am not calling crown to gold trading Fraud. And neither is ZOS.

I am pointing out that whatever it is ZOS has identified as fraud is more important to fix than these players worried about not being able to get crown store items.

jaws343

PrincessOfThieves wrote: »

fluffybunny wrote: »

IrisDupree wrote: »

This. Make it unpleasant and too much work for gold sellers and scammers. Account age, plus character level, plus cp level, plus friends list for x amount of time. Yeah would that suck for new players, sure. But at least they would know that after a certain amount of time they could trade and it also means people have to invest time in the game.
Gold sellers and credit card scammers are not going to bother to level and if they use bots to do it, then they will get caught. This also removes the desire for people to buy from them since they will have to friend them for months and I'd guess it'd be pretty easy for ZoS to figure out who is buying from scammers that way and boom both are banned.

What I just learned is that apparently people have been using VPNs to log into poorer countries where items in the crown store are much cheaper. If that is a major factor in this, then I really don’t see how gifting will ever come back. I know people who use VPNs to avoid ban evasions. So if ZOS can’t fix that, then I don’t know how they’ll figure this out. Obviously VPNs are a totally separate thing from ZOS.

Nefus brought up a good point where he said they may be bleeding a ton of money compared to what their projections are. In that case, wouldn’t they want to recuperate their losses? It doesn’t make sense to me, though, because if people didn’t have the money to buy crown store items before, it’s not like they will now.

Also I want to add I have no issue with crates being ungiftable due to the gambling thing and how little your chances are of getting the item(s) you want.

If they could block crown crates in Belgium, it shouldn't be a problem to block crown gifting for countries with regional pricing. So that people in these countries can still buy crowns for personal use, but not for sale.
Same with the other abuse methods, really. Just make it not worth the effort - like many people said, increase the account requirements for crown selling, put limits on new accounts etc.

But, accounts aren't country locked. I have an account in the US. If I moved to Canada, my account would be the same. If I lived 5 years in Canada and then moved back to the US, it would be insane if the money spent on crowns while in Canada would be unusable in the US.

That is essentially the problem here if the VPN sales issue is the actual issue. It's not the gifting itself that is the problem, it is the methods for purchasing the crowns in the first place. You would have to entirely halt crown store sales in countries where fraud is happening. For all players in that region or using VPNs to appear in that region.

boi_anachronism_

jaws343 wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Naftal wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

PrincessOfThieves wrote: »

Yeah. For me personally, being able to earn stuff in game is very important, and I spend a lot of time farming stuff I can sell (dungeon masks, writs and the like).
Without the ability to buy crown gifts, there will be no cosmetic goals to work towards and I will have significantly less motivation to play. The amount of cosmetics you can earn ingame is very limited, and some of them require insane feats such as trial trifectas.

Same with me, gridind for gold felt good because of the recompense of getting stuff from the crown store, now what's the point? The majority of my time playing was making gold, what am I supposed to do now? Just hoard a pile of useless fake currency?

You mean, play a video game...

Honestly, any outrage over this against ZOS is misplaced. Fraud is not good, and frankly, it is in ZOS' best interest to make sure their game doesn't allow for it.

They disabled the biggest gold sink in the game. I don't think you are thinking this through.

It's not a gold sink though. Gold sinks remove gold from players. All crown sales do is transfer gold around to other players.

And again, you are arguing in favor of fraud for some convenience in a video game.

Ah no. This has always been allowed. Why? Welp because someone is buying the crowns somewhere so zos still makes money. If anything this is gonna cut into their pockets reeeaaal fast because loads of people buy crowns just to trade them for gold. They wouldnt bother with them otherwise sooo uh good move zos.

To be clear, I am not calling crown to gold trading Fraud. And neither is ZOS.

I am pointing out that whatever it is ZOS has identified as fraud is more important to fix than these players worried about not being able to get crown store items.

"Players not being able to get crown store items" is literally money zos isnt getting. A lot of it. They are now bleeding from both ends.

jaws343

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Naftal wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

PrincessOfThieves wrote: »

Yeah. For me personally, being able to earn stuff in game is very important, and I spend a lot of time farming stuff I can sell (dungeon masks, writs and the like).
Without the ability to buy crown gifts, there will be no cosmetic goals to work towards and I will have significantly less motivation to play. The amount of cosmetics you can earn ingame is very limited, and some of them require insane feats such as trial trifectas.

Same with me, gridind for gold felt good because of the recompense of getting stuff from the crown store, now what's the point? The majority of my time playing was making gold, what am I supposed to do now? Just hoard a pile of useless fake currency?

You mean, play a video game...

Honestly, any outrage over this against ZOS is misplaced. Fraud is not good, and frankly, it is in ZOS' best interest to make sure their game doesn't allow for it.

They disabled the biggest gold sink in the game. I don't think you are thinking this through.

It's not a gold sink though. Gold sinks remove gold from players. All crown sales do is transfer gold around to other players.

And again, you are arguing in favor of fraud for some convenience in a video game.

Ah no. This has always been allowed. Why? Welp because someone is buying the crowns somewhere so zos still makes money. If anything this is gonna cut into their pockets reeeaaal fast because loads of people buy crowns just to trade them for gold. They wouldnt bother with them otherwise sooo uh good move zos.

To be clear, I am not calling crown to gold trading Fraud. And neither is ZOS.

I am pointing out that whatever it is ZOS has identified as fraud is more important to fix than these players worried about not being able to get crown store items.

"Players not being able to get crown store items" is literally money zos isnt getting. A lot of it. They are now bleeding from both ends.

And?

I think fixing a problem that causes fraudulent behavior seems to be more important to ZOS at the moment. My entire comment is on the player entitlement that their ability to trade crowns is more important than ZOS' intent to stop fraud that is clearly causing them problems. If it weren't they wouldn't be taking the drastic measures they are taking.

SeaGtGruff

I don't think someone trading Crowns (via the gifting of Crown Store items) that they purchased from ZOS to someone else for in-game gold that the other person generated is the problem.

I think the problem is probably something like "theft by conversion." I'm not sure how the gold-and-Crowns sellers work, but I imagine it might be something like the following:

Person A generates a huge amount of in-game gold. How they do it is irrelevant-- botting, legitimate harvesting and selling of resources, selling gear, selling carries, flipping items at guild traders, etc.

Person B doesn't have much gold but wants more-- in fact, they feel like they absolutely need a huge amount of gold in order to play the game. So person A decides to sell some of their gold to person B outside of the game for real money. I'm definitely not a legal expert, but I think this would be called "theft by conversion," because the in-game gold that person A is selling isn't actually theirs to sell, since the game and every piece of data within it actually belongs to ZOS. Person A has no legal right whatsoever to sell any of "their" in-game stuff to person B for real money-- period.

What a lot of players have been seeing are third parties posting ads in zone chat for websites where players can buy in-game gold outside of the game using real money, which I'm pretty sure is illegal. But they go even further and advertise the sale of Crown Store items at "low, low prices." I imagine the gold sellers must be using the money they've been making illegally to buy Crowns from ZOS and then turn around and "sell" those Crowns (in the form of "gifted" Crown Store items) on their third-party websites to players for real money. Person A uses their illegally-made money to buy a large number of Crown packets at the lowest possible per-Crown price, preferably when they're on sale. Then person B tells person A which Crown Store items they want to buy, and person A uses some of their Crowns to "gift" those items to person B at the advertised per-Crown price, most likely at a lower price than if person B had to buy the necessary Crowns themselves.

As I said, I don't know how it all works, so maybe my description is inaccurate or even completely wrong-- but that's what I imagine has been going on. And it's apparently gotten so rampant that ZOS has had to take these severe measures to try to put a stop to it. It must be difficult to tell at a glance whether someone is "gifting" a Crown Store item to another person for free, or in exchange for some amount of in-game gold, or in exchange for a fee paid by credit card on a third-party website, so they've essentially been forced to shut down all Crown Store gifting until they (or possibly even certain legal authorities) can conduct a thorough investigation and figure out a solution that will allow honest players to gift Crown Store items to each other without also allowing criminal enterprises to illegally exploit the Crown Store system for the purpose of generating large amounts of ill-gotten monies.

By the way, this sort of criminal enterprise didn't pop up because of ZOS or ESO; these sorts of "buy in-game currency for real money" websites have apparently been around since the earliest days of MMOs. And this type of criminal thinking didn't come into being with MMOs, either. Criminals have been looking for ways to illegally make lots of money for many, many centuries.

Murderhound

Eh, I just spoke with my wallet. I suggest you all do the same. You want to turn off an in game economy piece the players love. No more ESO+ from me. Might not be much from just me but if enough people do they might change their tune. Since their so worried about money.

boi_anachronism_

jaws343 wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Naftal wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

PrincessOfThieves wrote: »

Yeah. For me personally, being able to earn stuff in game is very important, and I spend a lot of time farming stuff I can sell (dungeon masks, writs and the like).
Without the ability to buy crown gifts, there will be no cosmetic goals to work towards and I will have significantly less motivation to play. The amount of cosmetics you can earn ingame is very limited, and some of them require insane feats such as trial trifectas.

Same with me, gridind for gold felt good because of the recompense of getting stuff from the crown store, now what's the point? The majority of my time playing was making gold, what am I supposed to do now? Just hoard a pile of useless fake currency?

You mean, play a video game...

Honestly, any outrage over this against ZOS is misplaced. Fraud is not good, and frankly, it is in ZOS' best interest to make sure their game doesn't allow for it.

They disabled the biggest gold sink in the game. I don't think you are thinking this through.

It's not a gold sink though. Gold sinks remove gold from players. All crown sales do is transfer gold around to other players.

And again, you are arguing in favor of fraud for some convenience in a video game.

Ah no. This has always been allowed. Why? Welp because someone is buying the crowns somewhere so zos still makes money. If anything this is gonna cut into their pockets reeeaaal fast because loads of people buy crowns just to trade them for gold. They wouldnt bother with them otherwise sooo uh good move zos.

To be clear, I am not calling crown to gold trading Fraud. And neither is ZOS.

I am pointing out that whatever it is ZOS has identified as fraud is more important to fix than these players worried about not being able to get crown store items.

"Players not being able to get crown store items" is literally money zos isnt getting. A lot of it. They are now bleeding from both ends.

And?

I think fixing a problem that causes fraudulent behavior seems to be more important to ZOS at the moment. My entire comment is on the player entitlement that their ability to trade crowns is more important than ZOS' intent to stop fraud that is clearly causing them problems. If it weren't they wouldn't be taking the drastic measures they are taking.

Im not interested in entitlement. Im interested in the financial aspect of it which is that zos has cut off a major sector of profit for the "forseeable future". Entitlement is irrelevant. Crown sellers are spending huge amounts of money - they now have no reason to do that. Microtransactions are the life blood of the game. You think this wont effect the budget and development of the game going forward if its not resolved in short order? Entitlement is an incredibly simplistic way to look at it. This is important for the sake of the game overall and anyone who says different has zero idea what they are talking about. What they are doing is a huge gamble. They are cutting off a segment of their profit to try and shore something up to get more long term. Keep in mind- this is digital currency not physical product. They technically arent losing anything but they will get more if they address the issue. The question is how long and what are the long term effects of cutting off a huge source of profit.

sarahthes

React wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

React wrote: »

This comment aged well, eh?

You know very well the scammers just moved on to regular crowns for gold exchanges once crates were removed as an option.

What? This whole thing never had anything to do with in game gold scammers. It's almost certainly zenimax trying to curb 3rd party crown sellers who purchased their crowns using either stolen credit cards or through using a VPN to Venezuela/Argentina in order to abuse the currency exchange rates.

That is what I meant by scammers, sorry if I wasn't clear.

wilykcat

200th comment

Aka_

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I don't think someone trading Crowns (via the gifting of Crown Store items) that they purchased from ZOS to someone else for in-game gold that the other person generated is the problem.

I think the problem is probably something like "theft by conversion." I'm not sure how the gold-and-Crowns sellers work, but I imagine it might be something like the following:

Person A generates a huge amount of in-game gold. How they do it is irrelevant-- botting, legitimate harvesting and selling of resources, selling gear, selling carries, flipping items at guild traders, etc.

Person B doesn't have much gold but wants more-- in fact, they feel like they absolutely need a huge amount of gold in order to play the game. So person A decides to sell some of their gold to person B outside of the game for real money. I'm definitely not a legal expert, but I think this would be called "theft by conversion," because the in-game gold that person A is selling isn't actually theirs to sell, since the game and every piece of data within it actually belongs to ZOS. Person A has no legal right whatsoever to sell any of "their" in-game stuff to person B for real money-- period.

What a lot of players have been seeing are third parties posting ads in zone chat for websites where players can buy in-game gold outside of the game using real money, which I'm pretty sure is illegal. But they go even further and advertise the sale of Crown Store items at "low, low prices." I imagine the gold sellers must be using the money they've been making illegally to buy Crowns from ZOS and then turn around and "sell" those Crowns (in the form of "gifted" Crown Store items) on their third-party websites to players for real money. Person A uses their illegally-made money to buy a large number of Crown packets at the lowest possible per-Crown price, preferably when they're on sale. Then person B tells person A which Crown Store items they want to buy, and person A uses some of their Crowns to "gift" those items to person B at the advertised per-Crown price, most likely at a lower price than if person B had to buy the necessary Crowns themselves.

As I said, I don't know how it all works, so maybe my description is inaccurate or even completely wrong-- but that's what I imagine has been going on. And it's apparently gotten so rampant that ZOS has had to take these severe measures to try to put a stop to it. It must be difficult to tell at a glance whether someone is "gifting" a Crown Store item to another person for free, or in exchange for some amount of in-game gold, or in exchange for a fee paid by credit card on a third-party website, so they've essentially been forced to shut down all Crown Store gifting until they (or possibly even certain legal authorities) can conduct a thorough investigation and figure out a solution that will allow honest players to gift Crown Store items to each other without also allowing criminal enterprises to illegally exploit the Crown Store system for the purpose of generating large amounts of ill-gotten monies.

By the way, this sort of criminal enterprise didn't pop up because of ZOS or ESO; these sorts of "buy in-game currency for real money" websites have apparently been around since the earliest days of MMOs. And this type of criminal thinking didn't come into being with MMOs, either. Criminals have been looking for ways to illegally make lots of money for many, many centuries.

Insightful, but as it is now, we still don't know what this fraudulent behavior is. Do I know the legality or corporate decisions as to why they're keeping this information from us? No, of course not. But I would love even a little more information on what this all means and what is really being done besides punishing a huge chunk of players for it. If they think it is a security risk to divulge that information, then tell us. No hard feelings there. But to leave us so in the dark that we have to rely on hypotheses from the playerbase versus the developers or company itself is unbelievably frustrating.

FantasticFreddie

wilykcat wrote: »

I block them anywhere online. I easily get jealous and annoyed at/of live streamers. They are also exempt from the rules 🙄😆.

[Edited comment, didn't like how I wrote it the first 3 times]

You get.... jealous? Of streamers?

You know anyone can create a twitch account and stream right? Or a youtube account?

DarkHero1989

Zenimax should actually investigate the suspicious behavior than to punish the player base who were not abusing the system. I hope their profits plummet because of this decision. Because i will not support them further.

wilykcat

FantasticFreddie wrote: »

wilykcat wrote: »

I block them anywhere online. I easily get jealous and annoyed at/of live streamers. They are also exempt from the rules 🙄😆.

[Edited comment, didn't like how I wrote it the first 3 times]

You get.... jealous? Of streamers?

You know anyone can create a twitch account and stream right? Or a youtube account?

Yes.
It is because they are popular, have lots of friends, make lots of money, and they get to work with employees for the video game companies. They get all that stuff I have a deep desire for; the unfortunate thing is that I don't have any of those. I don't think I'll ever will 😕.

SilverBride

DarkHero1989 wrote: »

Zenimax should actually investigate the suspicious behavior than to punish the player base who were not abusing the system. I hope their profits plummet because of this decision.

They are investigating and take the steps they need to put a stop to it. No one is being punished.

sarahthes

wilykcat wrote: »

FantasticFreddie wrote: »

wilykcat wrote: »

I block them anywhere online. I easily get jealous and annoyed at/of live streamers. They are also exempt from the rules 🙄😆.

[Edited comment, didn't like how I wrote it the first 3 times]

You get.... jealous? Of streamers?

You know anyone can create a twitch account and stream right? Or a youtube account?

Yes. It is because they are popular, have lots of friends, make lots of money, and they get to work with employees for the video game companies. They get all that stuff I have a deep desire for; the unfortunate thing is that I don't have any of those. I don't think I'll ever will 😕.

Make a Twitch account, start streaming. You never know what could happen unless you try.

Alaztor91

ZOS could have at least allowed gifting for ''old'' accounts, like for example if your account is 1+ years old you can still gift Crown Store items to other players who also have a 1+ year old account. The people involved in the ''fraudulent behavior'' aren't going to sit and wait for 1 year to sell/buy and I assume anyone who has played this game for 1+ year is also not going to risk losing his/her account just to get cheaper crowns/gold.

code65536

Zyva wrote: »

this is just the final line in the sand for me. A huge breech of player trust. It is beyond me how anyone can try to spin this in a positive light.

Not being able to access cash-shop cosmetics is a "breech (sic) of player trust"? That seems rather hyperbolic.

When I hear stories of people in WCE (which isn't policed like TCE) who sell over 100K crowns daily, that clearly screams "person using stolen credit cards to launder money by buying and reselling digital goods".

The evidence suggests that ZOS is doing the right thing. They likely halted crates when they noticed that it was the main things that the thieves were selling. But that clearly wasn't enough, so now they need to come up with something else. I've heard that other games put in a multi-day hold on things that can be purchased with money and are tradeable in-game because this sort of thing isn't unique to ESO.

Marcus684

SpiritKitten

Every single time I bought crowns was to buy service tokens. Not cosmetics. I used my ESO+ stipend for that. I was planning to start buying housing items with gold, since I have reached a level of in-game wealth where I can justify spending a few million on individual housing items. ( I bought a couple of music boxes with crowns.) But there goes that housing dream. Now I'll just scroll past instead of window shopping.

Panchaea

Here's a possible solution to your "problem", ZOS.

Maybe don't shove everything into the Crown Store and then charge a ridiculous amount and expect people to pay it. This just smells like more dark pattern behaviour (something my country's consumer regulation authority loves looking at) to nudge people into buying more Crowns.

It's become so egregious at this point that you put most cosmetics and services into the Store and have made in game earnable items ridiculously minimal outside of seasonal events that promote FOMO behaviour by making them temporary over a small period of time (which you ALREADY do with the Store).

It's like people pirating. A lot of people pirate because of media unavailability/too many streaming platforms that people cannot afford to have simultaneously. I'm not going promote RMTing - it's bad and you shouldn't pay real money for in game stuff like that, but do you really expect any different when people are doing it or buying crowns with in game gold they've earned because your Crown Store is deploying such an outrageous method. There are many ways other MMOs have tackled the fraud issue, from going after the sellers themselves and finding the buyers, but you've decided to punish everyone.

No trust at all. Multiple excuses for removing crate gifting, and a replacement system that not only changed the way the T&Cs were interpreted, but made the entire process a hundred times more difficult and offered no communication on how it would be improved. An AAA company so desperate for cash that it's tarnished the TES name by turning the current instalment of the game (the only one we will have for another 5 years) into a cash cow.

Bye Felicia.

kringled_1

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I don't think someone trading Crowns (via the gifting of Crown Store items) that they purchased from ZOS to someone else for in-game gold that the other person generated is the problem.

I think the problem is probably something like "theft by conversion." I'm not sure how the gold-and-Crowns sellers work, but I imagine it might be something like the following:

Person A generates a huge amount of in-game gold. How they do it is irrelevant-- botting, legitimate harvesting and selling of resources, selling gear, selling carries, flipping items at guild traders, etc.

Person B doesn't have much gold but wants more-- in fact, they feel like they absolutely need a huge amount of gold in order to play the game. So person A decides to sell some of their gold to person B outside of the game for real money. I'm definitely not a legal expert, but I think this would be called "theft by conversion," because the in-game gold that person A is selling isn't actually theirs to sell, since the game and every piece of data within it actually belongs to ZOS. Person A has no legal right whatsoever to sell any of "their" in-game stuff to person B for real money-- period.

What a lot of players have been seeing are third parties posting ads in zone chat for websites where players can buy in-game gold outside of the game using real money, which I'm pretty sure is illegal. But they go even further and advertise the sale of Crown Store items at "low, low prices." I imagine the gold sellers must be using the money they've been making illegally to buy Crowns from ZOS and then turn around and "sell" those Crowns (in the form of "gifted" Crown Store items) on their third-party websites to players for real money. Person A uses their illegally-made money to buy a large number of Crown packets at the lowest possible per-Crown price, preferably when they're on sale. Then person B tells person A which Crown Store items they want to buy, and person A uses some of their Crowns to "gift" those items to person B at the advertised per-Crown price, most likely at a lower price than if person B had to buy the necessary Crowns themselves.

As I said, I don't know how it all works, so maybe my description is inaccurate or even completely wrong-- but that's what I imagine has been going on. And it's apparently gotten so rampant that ZOS has had to take these severe measures to try to put a stop to it. It must be difficult to tell at a glance whether someone is "gifting" a Crown Store item to another person for free, or in exchange for some amount of in-game gold, or in exchange for a fee paid by credit card on a third-party website, so they've essentially been forced to shut down all Crown Store gifting until they (or possibly even certain legal authorities) can conduct a thorough investigation and figure out a solution that will allow honest players to gift Crown Store items to each other without also allowing criminal enterprises to illegally exploit the Crown Store system for the purpose of generating large amounts of ill-gotten monies.

By the way, this sort of criminal enterprise didn't pop up because of ZOS or ESO; these sorts of "buy in-game currency for real money" websites have apparently been around since the earliest days of MMOs. And this type of criminal thinking didn't come into being with MMOs, either. Criminals have been looking for ways to illegally make lots of money for many, many centuries.

I don't really think theft by conversion is the issue here. ZoS may not permit trading of gold for RL currency, but I am free to spend my gold in-game as foolishly or prudently as I like.
It's probably in another thread, but I think the scenario that code65536 laid out or something similar is much more likely - crowns are being purchased with stolen credit cards/account information, and then the crowns effectively are laundered by a cycle of "gifting" and gold selling.