Question: why aren't there tradable/giftable crown tokens yet?

Saucy_Jack · February 2021

Scenario: someone wants to buy a house which, let's say, costs 15k crowns. This person has SOME crowns (let's say 10k), but not the 15k they need. They have two options:

1. Buy enough crowns in the store to get at least 15k, then buy the house themselves.
2. Pay someone enough gold to have them gift the 15k house to them.

For people who don't have the RL cash to buy crowns in the store, option 1 isn't really an option. But if you only need 5k crowns to get what you want, it seems absurd that you'd have to shell out the gold for 15k crowns to have someone gift it to you.

So why isn't there like a giftable "crowns consumable" in the store? Like, it would cost however many crowns to buy/gift, and when the item is consumed, it gives the user that many crowns. Could have denominations of 1k, 2.5k, 5k, 10k, 25k. It seems obvious that a ton of players would find this useful, so why hasn't something like this been implemented?

bmnoble · February 2021

So long as its an option to purely convert your crowns into those kinda vouchers that you can in turn sell, via in game methods direct trade/guild stores, hesitant to say COD as well due to people leaving stuff in their mail to screw with people.

If they charged you a crown fee to convert your crowns to crown vouchers, I don't think many would end up bothering with they system.

redspecter23 · February 2021

Currently ZOS can just look the other way with crown - gold conversions. It's not against TOS, but they also don't get involved other than repeating that it's not against TOS.

Adding an actual mechanic in game provides safe trading which is good for everyone. Players won't get ripped off as often and customer service shouldn't have to deal with the tickets relating to rip offs and scams.

There has to be some logical reason why they don't just do this. I'd assume they anticipate it would lead to a loss in cash sales for their crowns. I don't follow that logic as regardless of how a crown item is acquired, someone bought the crowns in some way.

It might have to do with the conversion process on their end. Lets look at the worst case scenario. I buy a 20k crown pack and start gifting a pile of items away. The buyers get their items and I get my gold. All good, right? Well, what happens if I do a chargeback on my credit card that I used for the purchase? Once ZOS catches on, my account is likely toast, but I would have anticipated this and used a burner account. The gold is already laundered. What about the players that got the gifts? They might be subject to disciplinary actions as well and they didn't even do anything wrong. Even if they aren't actioned, they basically have "free" crown items at this point even if they aren't aware. ZOS won't discuss disciplinary actions against other players so they wouldn't even know. With the current system, this is dealt with on a case by case basis. However, once they legitimize the conversion process in game, this issue becomes much more widespread. Burner accounts shifting gold around at will. That could be a ton of "free" crown items flying around.

I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out extreme edge cases that could cause hesitation from ZOS.

bmnoble · February 2021

redspecter23 wrote: »

Currently ZOS can just look the other way with crown - gold conversions. It's not against TOS, but they also don't get involved other than repeating that it's not against TOS.

Adding an actual mechanic in game provides safe trading which is good for everyone. Players won't get ripped off as often and customer service shouldn't have to deal with the tickets relating to rip offs and scams.

There has to be some logical reason why they don't just do this. I'd assume they anticipate it would lead to a loss in cash sales for their crowns. I don't follow that logic as regardless of how a crown item is acquired, someone bought the crowns in some way.

It might have to do with the conversion process on their end. Lets look at the worst case scenario. I buy a 20k crown pack and start gifting a pile of items away. The buyers get their items and I get my gold. All good, right? Well, what happens if I do a chargeback on my credit card that I used for the purchase? Once ZOS catches on, my account is likely toast, but I would have anticipated this and used a burner account. The gold is already laundered. What about the players that got the gifts? They might be subject to disciplinary actions as well and they didn't even do anything wrong. Even if they aren't actioned, they basically have "free" crown items at this point even if they aren't aware. ZOS won't discuss disciplinary actions against other players so they wouldn't even know. With the current system, this is dealt with on a case by case basis. However, once they legitimize the conversion process in game, this issue becomes much more widespread. Burner accounts shifting gold around at will. That could be a ton of "free" crown items flying around.

I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out extreme edge cases that could cause hesitation from ZOS.

Either make it an ESO+ exclusive option and or set a certain amount of time you have to be subscribed before you can unlock the option on your account. Just like with the current 30 days before you unlock the option to gift items.