It's because ZOS still wants to sell Crown Crates. While the Seals of Endeavor are a bonus for players who just carry on and occasionally pick up a free item, it's pretty clear that this is in no way a substitute for Crown Crates. It's a bare minimum sop to industry critics of loot crate mechanics who're pushing for greater regulation.


One, it prevents us making easy comparisons like "it'll take X number of days to get Y item", especially coupled with the variable amounts of seals per day.

Two, it encourages players to save their seals for big ticket items like Apex and Radiant Apex tiers, where their seals are worth more, while spending gems or gambling for the more common lower tier rewards they want. For example, there's the Knight Aspirant style - if you want ALL the Style pages, it'll be 7,000 to 11,000 seals. It's far more efficient to save those for the really rare items.

Three, it's an extra conversion that further separates Seals from cash, psychologically. Much like how its easier to spend Crowns out of a separate wallet than your cash, It's very hard to quantify the "actual value" of seals because we have to figure the conversion to Crown gems, then compare that to the RNG of how many Crates we'd have to buy to get that many Crown gems. And then we'd have to think about how much cash we'd pay to buy that many Crowns. How much cash did I earn yesterday picking up 8 nodes for 15 seals? Who knows? It's complicated for a reason - ZOS doesn't want it to be quite that easy to put a monetary value on our effort, however minimal that effort is.


I just always keep in mind that ZOS only developed this system to protect their profits from industry regulators. The overall goal is not handing out "free" stuff. Seals were designed to preserve ZOS' profits from Crown Crates, not as a replacement.