Crown gifting has been used as a means of exchanging in-game gold for crown items since its inception. For the most part this has been a boon to the ESO community as those with excess crowns can trade for gold, and those with excess gold can acquire crown items. However a problem has come to light which urgently requires attention.

The problem stems from the fact that these exchanges in-game are not done through an interface that is secured and thus, is prone to scamming.

For an example: I recently offered gold in exchange for some crown crates. The person in question took my gold, then promptly logged out without gifting the agreed item, never to be seen again. Obviously this put me off the entire system as who would want to risk getting scammed every time they want to trade some gold for items?

This fear of being scammed (which happened to me on several other occasions and can go both ways, losing crowns or gold), has led to the emergence of certain large "Crown Exchange" sites. These sites started off with the helpful goal of providing an insurance system of sorts. Basically people would pay slightly more than the going rate for crowns, but then would have the trade go through a mediator system which would ensure (reasonably) they were not going to be scammed out of their currency.

This worked OK for a while, although it was largely a solution to a problem that never needed to exist if there were just a way to trade securely in-game. The problem however, is that the price for crown items procured through these exchanges has more than tripled in just under three years, while sources of gold in-game have not, leaving people with little recourse but to just pay the ever-increasing price, risk getting scammed, or abandon the system altogether.

As a crafter with 18 characters I can make somewhere in the neighborhood of 100k gold per day doing crafting writs, plus more if I get lucky with any rare gold material drops. I use addons to auto-craft the items in order to save time, however with login/logout and turn-ins this process still requires close to an hour to complete, and thus I do not have time do do all 18 characters every day. Frequently I will skip it entirely in favor of actually playing the game.

A simply crown item like a personal banker currently costing 5 MILLION GOLD or more through one of these "safe" exchanges is simply not sustainable for me, and I am what many would consider an outlier in my daily gold generation through crafting. I can only imagine how new players must feel.


MY SUGGESTION:

In order to solve the problem of crown exchange scamming, avoid runaway conversion rates excluding the bulk of players, and save ZOS overhead cost processing trouble tickets when people inevitably get scammed, I would like to propose the following simple solution:



By adding a simply "CoD" option to Crown Gifting as already exists for mail, the system could ensure that BOTH parties received the agreed-upon items, and that neither ever risked losing their currency if the other person chose not to pay.

The sender would CoD the crown item for the agreed upon gold, and if the person did not pay that gold before the mail timeout period, the system would refund the crowns to the sender much as items are returned to senders currently if they are not looted from the recipient's mailbox by this time limit.

Such a change would require very little developer time to implement, and yet would add an incredible benefit to players new and old alike.

PS: I hope recounting my personal experience with being repeatedly scammed doesn't make this too verbose but I felt was necessary for background and to clarify the scope of the problem.

@ZOS_GinaBruno could you pretty-please with puppies on top pass this up the chain of command for consideration?

Thanks!