In-Game Crown Store Gifting Pause: A Constructive & Reasonable reply

AmandaLubyk

@ZOS_Kevin stated:

Starting today, we are pausing in-game gifting (via the Crown Store) for the foreseeable future due to ongoing fraudulent behavior. We understand that the ability to gift to friends and guildmates is desired and of value to many of you. We will continue to explore options that will allow us to re-enable in-game gifting again in the future.

Thank you all for your understanding and continued support.
Edited by ZOS_Kevin on September 1, 2023 8:30AM
Community Manager for ZeniMax Online Studio and Elder Scrolls OnlineDev Tracker | Service Alerts | ESO Twitter
#1
8:09AM
Staff Post
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My response:

I honestly believe fraud of any magnitude is wrong. I also believe punishing the masses by restricting a prominent feature of your game is wrong.

Many guilds use crown gifting to fund raffles, and raffle ticket purchases fund guild traders. Guild leaders buy crown items as prizes for guild members who bought raffle tickets to support the guild. Your choice of action cripples these guilds’ fund raising ability.

As someone who has done programming before having to medically retire, I know it would not be terribly difficult for your team to adjust your current trading system to allow for crowns, or crown-bought items, to be traded as a gift. Crowns are simply a form of currency in ESO, just one that is purchased from Zenimax.

I am disappointed in your response to this issue. It is well within your capability as a large corporation to take care of this problem in the background without negatively affecting your customers. I cannot quite fathom why you reason that this is the best strategy for resolving fraud.

It would go far to help your customers, who are innocent bystanders, for you to detail why this response needs to be so extreme that it cripples guild fund-raising functionality for honest users. Please keep in mind that what will be most crippled will be your revenues. If guild leaders cannot gift crown items they will simply stop buying crowns in bulk. This is ultimately an unwise financial move on your part.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to your response.

Kind regards,
Amanda

WiseSky

Something along the lines of:

Must be certain CP LEVEL to GIFT

Accounts that are X months OLD can trade X time a week

Only accounts that have been verified with with Phone and/or ID and or Credit card matching IDs can gift.

Zyva

how about just put in a in-game way to exchange gold for crowns? like many other mmos have done?

Lozeenge

WiseSky wrote: »

Something along the lines of:

Must be certain CP LEVEL to GIFT

Accounts that are X months OLD can trade X time a week
...

Yeah sure, in theory either of these could work, but...

WiseSky wrote: »

...
Only accounts that have been verified with with Phone and/or ID and or Credit card matching IDs can gift.

Nope, stopping you right there. This has never worked out well for any game because people engaging in fraudulent activity are usually not that stupid and will use things like burner phone numbers or even stolen information to hide themselves. All this will accomplish is a massive PR issue for ESO because gamers will see this as a threat to user privacy and go into hysterics. Overwatch 2 tried implementing a phone number requirement for all accounts, as part of an anti-cheat, and was pressured to remove it one day later.

We all appreciate the initiative but can we maybe not?

NettleCarrier

Buying prizes with crowns is one of the biggest reason I purchase crowns at all. I'm not quite sure what to do now besides sit on them...

Marto

AmandaLubyk wrote: »

I honestly believe fraud of any magnitude is wrong. I also believe punishing the masses by restricting a prominent feature of your game is wrong.

Well that's the thing... You don't know the magnitude of the fraud, and have no evidence to say how big or small it is. Neither do I. Neither do any of us.

ZOS is the only one that knows if the credit card chargebacks measure in the dozens, hundreds, or thousands. They're the only ones who know how many item duplication glitches are performed.

KV_Tootn

Its preaty easy to stop all this fraud.

1. Make a CROWN token that you can exchange for gold via ingame trader.
2. Make endevour seals more apealable to earn and more.... I takes a year of griding to buy a awesome mount.
3. Make evertything earnable in game, IF you want to do it faster you pay for it, but let us earn the stuffs. ( houses and other shinys)
4. make more fun after endgame... NOt everyone can play even Endgame. Add mount drops with small % of drop rate so its fun to go dungeons, you never know what you get.

But for now.... 15k people are playing this dayly and numbers are going down. .. and i think it will be less and less )) Good lucks wit this

NettleCarrier

KV_Tootn wrote: »

Its preaty easy to stop all this fraud.

1. Make a CROWN token that you can exchange for gold via ingame trader.
2. Make endevour seals more apealable to earn and more.... I takes a year of griding to buy a awesome mount.
3. Make evertything earnable in game, IF you want to do it faster you pay for it, but let us earn the stuffs. ( houses and other shinys)
4. make more fun after endgame... NOt everyone can play even Endgame. Add mount drops with small % of drop rate so its fun to go dungeons, you never know what you get.

But for now.... 15k people are playing this dayly and numbers are going down. .. and i think it will be less and less )) Good lucks wit this

Ohh man, I've love some form of mount drop chance - even if extremely small! I have over a hundred mounts at this point, but I have collected all the gear in over half the dungeons so when I get most of them while doing a random queue it's kind of a bummer because there's absolutely NOTHING that can drop that could bring any excitement at all. Even the rarest world drop (the Aetheric Cipher) wouldn't be that exciting because I could just buy 10 of them right now if I wanted to.

thorwyn

As someone who has done programming before having to medically retire, I know it would not be terribly difficult for your team to ...

I stopped reading there...

ZOS_Hadeostry

Greetings,

Because there is a thread already open on this topic, which started earlier and has more posts, we're going to close this one down so that all feedback can be consolidated in one place.

You may continue the discussion here. Thank you for your understanding.