Possible to steal items in COD?

xlm454

About 4 days and 6 hours ago or so, I was advertising some goods for sale in zone chat. I had someone make an agreeable offer for some number of grain solvents and tempering alloys adding up to 21,000 gold. I asked if he would like to meet me at the bank to make the trade, and he replied to just COD them, stating that he would pay the postage. Being naive, I decided to go ahead and send it. Well, a couple minutes went by and I received no reply with my gold. I logged out and back in to see if mail was simply lagging. Still nothing. I messaged him again, and no response.

At this point, I knew that he wasn't going to pay and I just lost 5k in postage because of stupid COD rates. After some research, I found that most people said the item would be returned within 3 days if another person does not accept or reject a COD. So I shrugged it off, decided I would take the 5k loss and never use the COD system again, and simply wait for my items to return to me. However, it has been over 4 days and I have not received the items. I am also certain that the gold never came in (I would have noticed 25k gold in a mail). Is it untrue that items will be returned after 3 days? Or is it possible that he was somehow able to steal the items from the mail without paying the fee? Any insight would be appreciated.

Also, I remember the user's toon name, but won't post here for privacy reasons (because I know some companies are against that stuff).

Soliduparrow

if your mail is full it sends the gold back to him

why havent you asked him what happened?

nudel

Are you sure you ticked 'COD' as opposed to 'Send Gold'? You may have inadvertently sent him gold instead.

Im_So_Tanked

I had a similar case with a guy buying level 35-50 armour pieces. I sent him the armour a couple of days ago and havent recieved money or the armour back.

Aldarund

Afaik its no 3 days. Its 30 days. So its a way to get out of the market competitors

Stormynature

An old trick in some MMOs was to contact a competitor who supplied similar goods to yourself and get them to COD their entire stock at which point you simply ignored the letter and sold your own goods whilst your competitor's good were left in Limbo...by which time such levelled goods became somewhat worthless.

Seroczynski

Selling by COD mail requires trust towards the buyer. I have had some negative experience with it, but I found most people to be trustworthy so I still do it.

I also thought the expiry date on COD mail to be the same as normal mail, but someone informed me it wasn't. You can read about it here.

dbennett707cub18_ESO

I've found everyone ive COD'd with to be trustworthy so far, I even one time sent a guy gold by accident, and he sent my gold back + what he was supposed to pay.

Evandus

dbennett707cub18_ESO wrote: »

I've found everyone ive COD'd with to be trustworthy so far, I even one time sent a guy gold by accident, and he sent my gold back + what he was supposed to pay.

That was likely me. However I wouldn't bet on the majority of the playerbase having some scruples in nearly anon interactions

To the OP, I haven't heard about anyone being able to exploit the COD system. That doesn't mean it's impossible though. Try putting in a ticket and see what the CS people find examining the logs. That might be most helpful at this point.

I like the COD option. It's nice because I can continue questing and still pick up items for my crafter to process. If there is a problem, I hope it's identified and dealt with quickly. Personally I like buying/selling things with that system. I'd hate to see masses of people refusing to use it.

zeuseason

I'd personally never send anything over 1k via COD. Too much postage even if the buyer says they'd pay it. I'd just report this in a ticket and see if the GM's can do anything about it.

xlm454

To answer a few questions so far: I'm certain I selected COD and not send gold. The postage would not have been 5k if I selected send gold. And, I sent him messages and mail, but he replied to none of it.

rulien

I sent my GF some stuff and I COD it just to be an ass and she never got the mail and I never got the items back don't know what happen. that was about 15-16 days ago

ThisOnePosts

There are definitely scammers. GMs need to be proactive about this. Otherwise it will defeat the whole purpose of COD. It should pop-up on their screen and they have to accept or decline, no response is a decline. Log out crash etc.. is a decline. No COD fee charged to seller.

ThisOnePosts

Also I noticed.... they delete their characters but not accounts afterwards. This must be a loophole of some sort. I submitted a ticket for one who did it for something very silly.. a Fortified Sweetroll Recipe (which at this point I'm into the VR zones and have tons of gold, so the few hundred means nothing and I have found that recipe a bunch of times and it's known to me.. I usually give them away for free). However, anyone in league with the scum goldscammers who can't get real jobs, needs to go. I have a feeling it's something they do as well. Maybe deleting the character allows you to take it on another since they share mail. I don't know and I'm not about to try it, however there's no high demand for something like that --- not to mention people don't just delete characters for that.

GMs, please look into this.. this could cause a heck of a lot of problems if people sell high gold items COD (which many do regardless). We shouldn't have to worry if we are sending COD or not.

Also, I haven't tried it but if someone puts the gold in when trading next to the person.. then removes it will it reset the trade? Or can they in theory click it fast and take it for free? If so, that needs revamping as well.. if not, then good.

BenjaminKacher_ESO

Aldarund wrote: »

Afaik its no 3 days. Its 30 days. So its a way to get out of the market competitors

^this

Knottypine

I think the postage is just way too high. If at some point (30 days maybe) you get your items returned, I'll assume that your postage would be refunded as well. To sell things you basically have to account for the % of postage it'll cost to mail, which kind of sucks.

Malediktus

Its 3 days. Someone send me something with cod before and it definatly said 3 days on the timer

Evandus

Idk folks...

I've had rather good luck with the COD system so far. Two examples from yesterday:

1. Selling 6 motifs I found while scaveging cabinets/wardrobes/nightstands/desks/trunks/etc looking for racial crafting mats. Sold them at 400gp apeice to move them fast. So one guy got a decent deal compared to what people are asking for in chat (1200gp for six motifs). Sent that COD. No issues...

2. Buying a number of Sanded Maples, Sanded Oak to process down. These were all sent via COD. No issues there.

3. Crafting up some stuff for folks asking for it in general chat. There were some new to the game folks wanting to purchase Death's Wind green armor or weapons. Pretty easy stuff to make really. But okay, it's worth a few coins.


Anyway, that was yesterday for a couple of hours on my crafter past trying to level his skills. Thankfully, I've had no problems.

ThisOnePosts

I've used COD over 100 x. You are talking about just a few dealings. The more you do eventually you will run into the issue unless it gets fixed. Out of the 100+ times, I've had this happen once. Still, I imagine it will become more widespread the further it is excluded from being fixed.

ZOS can and will get to the bottom of this, they've done a great job so far and created a great game. Hopefully this is on the priority currently-working-on list.

dpgirl

why would anyone COD? if your both online, its much cheaper to just wayshrine and meet up.

Anyways... All CODs should be tracked and you should be able to hit cancel/recall at any time to pull it back. Fees should not be charged until the transaction is completed, and the "fee" should be deducted from the money gained, not paid outright before hand.

xlm454

As of today, my support ticket has been escalated to a "veteran agent" and it was confirmed that I did send the items in mail to a valid character. I wonder if this issue is part of the reason for the upcoming change to the cod system. Perhaps my items were stolen though some exploit. And just wanted to say a quick thanks to ZOS for their quick support and (what appears to be) diligence regarding this issue.