“Tamriel Crown Exchange” Discord has too much control

VoidCommander · June 2022

The fact that the entirety of crown trading services in ESO is almost exclusively controlled by a single discord server is extremely unnerving. Why hasn’t ZOS made crowns themselves a trade-able currency? Its long overdue at this point, and I imagine the ease of sale of crowns would significantly increase ZOS’s crown store profits.

If there is a reason against doing this I would love to learn about it. Is it supposed to be an anti-inflation/gold farming measure?

NeuroticPixels · June 2022

I can’t stand how the 2 most known crown selling & buying discord channels are setting the standards of what crowns should cost. TCE raised their price to 1500:1.
1500:1!!!!!
We’ll start seeing those prices posted in guilds and zone chat soon, I’m sure. And that price is ridiculous, imo.

BloodyStigmata · June 2022

TCE has to raise prices. They provide a service that ZOS should be providing but don't. Furthermore they have a finite number of sellers with a finite number of crowns, and a large amount of traffic daily that is difficult to manage.

Couple that with the fact that the value of gold itself is decreasing due to inflation and price-raising both in and out of their server is only natural.

It's a bit unfair to project malicious intent onto them when they're a volunteer network of people who are sacrificing large amounts of their time just so people like us can have safe transactions, which to reiterate, is a service that ZOS should be providing.

SainguinKrist · June 2022

It's not TCE's fault.

A proper ingame crown trading system should of been a thing the moment ZOS approved crown trading.

It can only make them more money.

I'm constantly telling people 100+ CP that you're allowed to buy crowns from other players for gold, and they're always blown away cause it's the first they've heard about it.

There's a massive market they're missing out on.

A proper ingame crown trading system can only benefit everyone.

KitsuneShoujo · June 2022

Gold has no value in itself since it doesn't exist outside the game. SO the only thing that is causing inflation is pure greed. But I agree that Zeni is missing out.

They would make FAR more money with a gold/crown market than they do off from crates I think - I have no way of proving that of course, but GW2's entire cash shop works around this and they are very successful.

VoidCommander · June 2022

BloodyStigmata wrote: »

TCE has to raise prices. They provide a service that ZOS should be providing but don't. Furthermore they have a finite number of sellers with a finite number of crowns, and a large amount of traffic daily that is difficult to manage.

Couple that with the fact that the value of gold itself is decreasing due to inflation and price-raising both in and out of their server is only natural.

It's a bit unfair to project malicious intent onto them when they're a volunteer network of people who are sacrificing large amounts of their time just so people like us can have safe transactions, which to reiterate, is a service that ZOS should be providing.

Who is projecting malicious intent on them? This is a problem directed at ZOS for ZOS to solve. Zero reason to assume Malicious intent.

Also, the reason crowns are so expensive is NOT because of inflation of gold in the game. The amount of gold has not increased over 6 fold in less than a year. Sorry, but there is no way that is the case. The reason why crowns specifically have inflated is because it is so difficult to actually trade them, resulting in a MUCH higher scarcity of available crowns for sale than a free-trade crown market would allow.

If I was a betting man, I'd guess the average cost of crowns would halve if free "coin-by-crown" trading was implemented into ESO. Deliberate or not, the scarcity of sellers (and ultimately the ones who are vetted out by the discord) results in artificial scarcity and thus greatly inflated prices.

HyekAr · June 2022

VoidCommander wrote: »

The fact that the entirety of crown trading services in ESO is almost exclusively controlled by a single discord server is extremely unnerving. Why hasn’t ZOS made crowns themselves a trade-able currency? Its long overdue at this point, and I imagine the ease of sale of crowns would significantly increase ZOS’s crown store profits.

If there is a reason against doing this I would love to learn about it. Is it supposed to be an anti-inflation/gold farming measure?

Probably the only reason I see, they dont want to create this, it is bcz they think that doing this.. ppl just will gain gold to exchange it for crown, and buy DLC. Which is not accurate analisis, cz the exchange might bring new effects, like lack of crown to exchange, which will create a demand

chessalavakia_ESO · June 2022

VoidCommander wrote: »

The fact that the entirety of crown trading services in ESO is almost exclusively controlled by a single discord server is extremely unnerving. Why hasn’t ZOS made crowns themselves a trade-able currency? Its long overdue at this point, and I imagine the ease of sale of crowns would significantly increase ZOS’s crown store profits.

If there is a reason against doing this I would love to learn about it. Is it supposed to be an anti-inflation/gold farming measure?

Personally, I buy my crowns on zone chat. I've never used TCE and I do not intend to do so. I pay whatever price I've seen on zone chat in the last few days plus a bit higher. Once I have a chat confirmation that they'll do the exchange they get the full sum then they buy the item once they are sure they got the correct amount. Nobody has ever tried to scam me.

An official crown selling setup would likely raise prices rather than lower as the current system suppresses buyers more than sellers.

The increase in the price of crowns might also lead to an increase in the price of goods across the board as the players selling crowns would have more gold to spend which might lead to them paying more.

The official crown selling setup would also run into increased issues with illicit gold as well as reputational issues on the goods. Right now, somebody that owns a crown house is generally someone that either bought a ton of crowns or someone that has been ESO+ for a while. With an official Crowns to Gold, it would also move to include more players that do well on the marketplace as well as players that sell runs through content and both groups don't necessarily carry great reputations which in turn can devalue the goods.

Unless the number of people scamming goes up and starts costing them a fair bit of money to fix it's probably cheaper for them to keep the status quo.

VoidCommander · June 2022

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

VoidCommander wrote: »

The fact that the entirety of crown trading services in ESO is almost exclusively controlled by a single discord server is extremely unnerving. Why hasn’t ZOS made crowns themselves a trade-able currency? Its long overdue at this point, and I imagine the ease of sale of crowns would significantly increase ZOS’s crown store profits.

If there is a reason against doing this I would love to learn about it. Is it supposed to be an anti-inflation/gold farming measure?

Personally, I buy my crowns on zone chat. I've never used TCE and I do not intend to do so. I pay whatever price I've seen on zone chat in the last few days plus a bit higher. Once I have a chat confirmation that they'll do the exchange they get the full sum then they buy the item once they are sure they got the correct amount. Nobody has ever tried to scam me.

An official crown selling setup would likely raise prices rather than lower as the current system suppresses buyers more than sellers.

The increase in the price of crowns might also lead to an increase in the price of goods across the board as the players selling crowns would have more gold to spend which might lead to them paying more.

The official crown selling setup would also run into increased issues with illicit gold as well as reputational issues on the goods. Right now, somebody that owns a crown house is generally someone that either bought a ton of crowns or someone that has been ESO+ for a while. With an official Crowns to Gold, it would also move to include more players that do well on the marketplace as well as players that sell runs through content and both groups don't necessarily carry great reputations which in turn can devalue the goods.

Unless the number of people scamming goes up and starts costing them a fair bit of money to fix it's probably cheaper for them to keep the status quo.

You are extremely fortunate to have never been scammed from zone chat. ZOS is extremely consistant when it comes to straight up perma-banning crown scammers, so it could very well be that people that would scam for crowns have mostly been weeded out by now.

I tried buying crowns from zone chat just to "see if it was as bad as people said it was." Dude literally scammed me. Never trusted zone chat again after that.

Skullstachio · June 2022

Warframe is a perfect example of Premium currency being tradable. (Which is Platinum.) I would 100% agree that making Crowns a tradable premium currency would be good as it would eliminate crown scammers on a small scale, but even with something like that, it may open up a new proverbial can of problems unseen to both devs and players alike.

Amottica · June 2022

I doubt we are going to get an answer to that question. I do agree that Zenimax should set up a system for trading crowns for gold, or at least the crown store items for gold, directly.

If it is a crown for gold system it should cost a 10% fee. If it is a crown store item for gold system then we should be able to list the items on a trader which would charge the fee.