Since Crown gifting became a thing a certain Discord group has sort of insinuated themselves as the go-to standard for gold trading. From what I understand, this group charges a 5% fee for essentially facilitating, which is fine, however I feel that the price they are trying to set as the standard (225g per Crown) is a bit high considering the average time equivalent to earn gold.

As I see it, the whole purpose of allowing people to trade gold for Crowns is to avoid burnout of customers who play the game and even pay a monthly sub but can't always come up with extra disposable income during the sometimes 5-day or less window for limited time offers of things they would really like to have. Being able to spend gold on these things gives them another avenue to not miss out, which is awesome.

The main problem I have with the 225g per crown price point is the time equivalent for how much gold it would take to buy the average special whatever on the store. Lets take the average price of motifs as an example. Some go for 4k crowns, some as high as 6k, but the average for a new motif seems to be around 5k crowns. At 225g per crown it would cost 1 million 125 thousand gold to make this purchase through the 'official' Discord guild.

* The price of 5k crowns (not on sale) is $39.99 USD. This is about 2-3 hours work at a minimum wage job.

* The average time to make over a million gold in-game can be well over a MONTH for the average player.

Obviously this will be a problem once people blow through their initial reserves of disposable gold they have saved, as setting the price that high means the whole purpose of gifting, giving people an alternative means of not missing cool limited time things, will have been largely defeated, since the average player will not be able to keep up earning enough gold for more than maybe one such purchase per month, and even then only if they are diligent about doing dailies on many alts and really making an effort to spend their game time making gold, which most really won't be interested or able to do.

So, what I would like to suggest is an alternate price point more in line with the time investment required to earn gold. What many of my guilds and people I know in-game have come up with is between 150g-180g per Crown. We have had many 10's of thousands of Crowns transacted at these rates and both parties have always come away satisfied.

I get that some people are willing to pay more for a little added security, but I still feel that 225g is pretty steep given the average rate of earning gold. AVERAGE rate, not guild store hero spend all day flipping trades rate.

I feel that just like in real world economics, the danger of having only one 'standard' outlet is that prices end up being set too high.

At 150g per crown, that 5k motif would cost 750 thousand gold. So, less than 3 hours at a minimum wage job for probably a couple weeks worth of gold.

This to me seems much more fair. But I would be interested to see where the community stands on this.