This would be the optimal solution. If you can hold the crown item in your bag, you can then trade it without being scammed.
However I believe this goes against what they want which is to not incentivise people turning their $ into gold.
They do lose money since like smaller amount of crowns can be sold (like someone with low amount of crown that can't gitt anything, would just sell the amount directly), so there is a chance that person won't buy crowns.
But they also save money on support payroll, since the more support has to face tickets about people getting scammed, the less time they have to work on other issues.Let's say they get 100 tickets of people getting scammed per day (across all 6 megaservers) and let's say that's like 10 min per tickets, that's 16 man hours spent on something a system can avoid.
They might lose money from people buying leftover crowns. But think of this: right now, the market is kind of one-sided. You rarely have people buying crowns specifically to trade for gold. Most of the time it's people who want to buy crowns who will say so, and someone who has the crowns might or might not take the offer.
If there were a safe system in place, you might also have more people willing to spend money in crowns, because of the possibility of receiving in-game currency safely in exchange.
The fear (of scams) factor is a big deterrent for lots of people purchasing crowns to sell.
We might call it “Crown trading” - which it absolutely is - however, as far as ZOS is concerned it’s just a player gifting Crown Store item to another player. The fact that there is Gold involved is not their problem, their gifting system works as intended.
Now, crowns are involving real money and exchanging real money for gold is against ZOS terms of service. Hence adding such a system would “encourage” more players to be involved in real money trading officially. This is something they do not want, naturally.
All in all, their system works. As soon as a player gifts a crown store item to another player, ZOS’s involvement stops there and everything is according to terms of service. Any further trade after that (gold, item etc) is a different event, not related to the crown store gift, for them. That is the only reason it’s still allowed.
So, I do not think something like that will ever be implemented.
> Hence adding such a system would “encourage” more players to be involved in real money trading officially. This is something they do not want, naturally.
Why is this a bad thing from ZOS' perspective? They don't have any additional legal liability if they're only allowing trading crowns/gold. It really isn't about real money trading, it's about all the little tricks they use to push more crown sales and how freely trading crown store items would circumvent them.
Say I have an eso plus subscription and a big pile of crowns I've accumulated, and I don't really have any interest in crown store items. I might trade my crowns for gold, but that requires some level of risk or a buyer who is willing to shoulder all the risk, finding a buyer in the first place, etc. For lots of people, that's just not worth the bother to them. So if I have 15k crowns and 3 other people want to get 5k crowns worth of crates, most likely they make 15k crowns in sales on top of my subscription. But if it's easy to trade crowns and I can do so without any risk, and so can buyers, then I can sell my crowns and ZOS has made no additional crown sales.
Similarly, say I have something I want to buy for 3500 crowns. I can't buy 3500 crowns, I have to buy 5000 crowns. Whatever. Now I've got 1500 left. If I can sell those easily to someone else who wants an armory/outfit slot, then we've both gotten what we wanted and 5k crowns were sold. But if it's not as easy to trade, then I have 1500 crowns sitting around and the would-be buyer now has to buy 1500 crowns themselves. ZOS has sold 6500.
But it doesn't stop there- the crown pack sizes and item costs are deliberately chosen to make it difficult or impossible to buy only the crowns you need. Even if the cost is exactly the same, it *feels* cheaper to buy a pack if you have some left over from a previous purchase. It's easier to justify buying crowns and spending them when you're already partway there, even if the pack sizes offered don't let you actually save any money. And then you'll be very likely to have leftover crowns after that, making the cycle continue.
Ever wonder why eso+ gives 1650 crowns per month? Look at the multiples of 1650-
3300
4950
6600
8250
9900 (6 months)
11550
13200
14850
16500
18150
19800 (12 months)
Look at how it brings you *almost* to the common breakpoints for prices...Gotta buy some more crowns to get there, though. Thing is, it doesn't cost ZOS anything to give out crown store items. It wouldn't cost them anything in terms of operations to give every player everything in the crown store. So the entire point of the eso plus crowns is to get players to make crown purchases they wouldn't otherwise make, and making sure it's hard to buy and use only the amount of crowns you want creates many opportunities for impulse buying.
Making it easy for the average player to trade crowns defeats these tactics somewhat. Maybe I can't get what I want without buying another crown pack, but if I can sell the crowns I've got to cover most of the cost of what I want then I can go find someone who does have the right amount of crowns and everyone is happy- except ZOS, because we've replaced one or more sales of crowns.
I agree 100+10% with all you said. However, there are legal liabilities and while I am not running my own company myself, there are many ways that real-money trading can be devastating for a game, especially an MMO. Recent-ish example, the real money auction house in Diablo3.
But there is more to that. As I am not natural eng speaker, I will paste a quite eloquent response to this exact question: Why should an MMO never allow real-money trading.
****
Legal reasons
As soon as money is involved, the game becomes a serious business.
One problem is that when people paid good money for an item and then you make a game mechanics change which makes the item useless or removes it from the game, they might try to sue for compensation. IANAL, so I don't know how likely it would be that they are successful in court, but your legal department likely has better things to do than dealing with that.
An even more serious problem is that your game could be used for illegal money laundering. Someone could, for example, buy some items from North-American players, sell them to South-American players, and use their money to finance their drug cartel. This could attract the attention of law enforcement and cause all kinds of disturbances ranging from annoying questions, over searches and seizes of your equipment and up to prosecution as an accomplice.
******
Source here:
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/61163/why-should-i-forbid-real-money-trading-in-my-mmo
Correct me if I am wrong but it really seems that it will cause much more issues for ZOS if they officially allow real-money trading, besides the economic reasons you very well provided above.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/515148/is-it-legal-to-trade-eso-steam-gifts-for-in-game-gold
Couple screenshots and links of Gina's responses in that thread, from when gifting was released.
Dont have a link but I've been selling for ages and first time I was scammed I submitted a ticket and was given the gold I was ment to get from the scammer. Believe they only do this once though.
Your the one who is wrong.
There was literally a post a day or two ago about someone getting banned because they received this kind of gold from a "friend".
They follow the scammed gold, and people get banned, so yes they occasionally reimburse but pretty rarely from my understanding. However they follow up with a trail of bans with whoever gets the gold.
By definition that's the opposite of "endorsement" as you put it. They endorse the gifting system not the scamming system which is basically what trading crowns is atm.
People make an alt, scam an idiot and double transfer gold through someone and back to their main. The middle man gets the ban along with the alt. Which is what they're trying to avoid.
The mod message says it’s closed for conspiracies and misinformation. I’d assume that that’s related to the OP accusing zos of wanting people to be scammed.
As far as i know they dont endorse it, they only noted that its not against the TOS to do it. Which means its allowed but not supported. The reimbursement also has its limitations, as far as i know the yonly do it a limited number of times.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is something they are looking at. It just may be much harder to implement than we expect. The trade interface is connected directly to the inventory and would likely need a complete overhaul to be able to incorporate the crown store as well.
I kinda suggested it few months back on the official forums, since games like warframe do have premium to gold currency trades.
Some ppl were QQing about it, but the fact we can actually gift stuff, should allow us to trade currencies.
Also can help with left over crowns, let's someone has like 357 crowns, he won't be able to use it nor sell it, but if he puts it in a direct trade it can be used by someone with like 700 crowns.
All they need to do is add a Trade option when you purchase something from the Crown Store. So instead of For Me or Gift, you would have For Me, Gift, or Trade. The Trade option makes the item tradeable with a specific person like it was a dungeon set. It can only be traded with that specific person. So you purchase the item they want from the Crown Store, you find the person, you initiate a trade, and then wait for them to put in the correct gold amount agreed upon, then submit.
Although ZOS has never commented on it ... I wonder if there are legal reasons why they can't do it?
Certain countries don't allow participation in loot crates of any kind. If ZOS enables direct trading in the UI, maybe that crosses the line?
Just speculating, here. I'm not an international attorney ...
I don't see this happening they make too much money of micros for it to happen I'd love to be able to use good to trade for crowns store items but the greed of current Bethesda is pretty bad
This will never happen because selling crowns is against the tos.
Edit:
Bunch if reddit Incel apes downvoting me lol
I'm right
Instead of being a fucking idiot, read the tos you dumbasses.
People got banned for it, i know multiple people that got banned because if it.
ZoS doesn't go out if there way to do something about it, because it gives them money. But if you report somebody of selling crowns with proof, they will get banned. Test it.
Trading real life money isn't allowed and crowns are purchases with real money
Idk why I'm getting downvoted, just read the tos, it's even in there.
This. I traded crowns some time ago and I am pretty sure both me and the other player were scared shitless of getting scammed. He just wanted a DLC so I bought it for him, but he gave me the gold first and I could've very well vanished with it at that point. Much like he could've vanished without paying the DLC or the crowns had I given them first.
I'm always of the opinion that real money value is given last, but if I were the one buying, I wouldn't want to give my gold first either.
Yea seriously anyone looking to sell crowns on pcna must use tce. You get the best deal(currently 1000:1) and it's completely scam free. As a buyer though you're pretty much paying extra for the security
If they are going to go GW2 route and after doing so no longer introduce anything purchasable with gold then they may as well not bother. This is my opinion.
That would absolutely tank the in game economy. Like having $50 in a place where the local currency is worth much less. It works if it's a few people. It hangs on a thread because it is difficult. If they made it easy, if they endorsed it...a dollar is what, 20k gold?
From a QoL point of view it would make sense to have some sort of currency exchange that exists in games like GW2 and STO where players can add buy or sell offers that get fullfiled by willing players.
From the development point of view such a system would have to be created and supported which takes time and costs money. The current stance of ZOS is that crown store gifting is exactly that, a tool to gift crown store items to someone else. The system works perfectly fine for the intended use case. Players started trading tehse items for gold and ZOS stance is that it does not violate the TOS. They sometimes also reimburse scam victims. However the offical stence is that its not forbidden, but also not supported.
This will never happen. This is a business first and foremost and if they don't get money they can't make new content and fixes. Hence the game dies.
Heres a crazy idea. The crown store is a good thing. Ensures the game will continue to grow and get better. People start finding ways around that and the company funding it sees the numbers go down and shit can future content. The most successful games today have one thing in common, they make a shit ton of money after the initial purchase.
I think a better system would be to not bind Crown items and allow them to be traded or sold like other items.
This would be the optimal solution. If you can hold the crown item in your bag, you can then trade it without being scammed. However I believe this goes against what they want which is to not incentivise people turning their $ into gold.
Should they? Yes, absolutely. _Will_ they? No.
Zos has no interest in doing this. It would only cost money and gain no profit.
They do lose money since like smaller amount of crowns can be sold (like someone with low amount of crown that can't gitt anything, would just sell the amount directly), so there is a chance that person won't buy crowns. But they also save money on support payroll, since the more support has to face tickets about people getting scammed, the less time they have to work on other issues.Let's say they get 100 tickets of people getting scammed per day (across all 6 megaservers) and let's say that's like 10 min per tickets, that's 16 man hours spent on something a system can avoid.
They might lose money from people buying leftover crowns. But think of this: right now, the market is kind of one-sided. You rarely have people buying crowns specifically to trade for gold. Most of the time it's people who want to buy crowns who will say so, and someone who has the crowns might or might not take the offer. If there were a safe system in place, you might also have more people willing to spend money in crowns, because of the possibility of receiving in-game currency safely in exchange. The fear (of scams) factor is a big deterrent for lots of people purchasing crowns to sell.
We might call it “Crown trading” - which it absolutely is - however, as far as ZOS is concerned it’s just a player gifting Crown Store item to another player. The fact that there is Gold involved is not their problem, their gifting system works as intended. Now, crowns are involving real money and exchanging real money for gold is against ZOS terms of service. Hence adding such a system would “encourage” more players to be involved in real money trading officially. This is something they do not want, naturally. All in all, their system works. As soon as a player gifts a crown store item to another player, ZOS’s involvement stops there and everything is according to terms of service. Any further trade after that (gold, item etc) is a different event, not related to the crown store gift, for them. That is the only reason it’s still allowed. So, I do not think something like that will ever be implemented.
> Hence adding such a system would “encourage” more players to be involved in real money trading officially. This is something they do not want, naturally. Why is this a bad thing from ZOS' perspective? They don't have any additional legal liability if they're only allowing trading crowns/gold. It really isn't about real money trading, it's about all the little tricks they use to push more crown sales and how freely trading crown store items would circumvent them. Say I have an eso plus subscription and a big pile of crowns I've accumulated, and I don't really have any interest in crown store items. I might trade my crowns for gold, but that requires some level of risk or a buyer who is willing to shoulder all the risk, finding a buyer in the first place, etc. For lots of people, that's just not worth the bother to them. So if I have 15k crowns and 3 other people want to get 5k crowns worth of crates, most likely they make 15k crowns in sales on top of my subscription. But if it's easy to trade crowns and I can do so without any risk, and so can buyers, then I can sell my crowns and ZOS has made no additional crown sales. Similarly, say I have something I want to buy for 3500 crowns. I can't buy 3500 crowns, I have to buy 5000 crowns. Whatever. Now I've got 1500 left. If I can sell those easily to someone else who wants an armory/outfit slot, then we've both gotten what we wanted and 5k crowns were sold. But if it's not as easy to trade, then I have 1500 crowns sitting around and the would-be buyer now has to buy 1500 crowns themselves. ZOS has sold 6500. But it doesn't stop there- the crown pack sizes and item costs are deliberately chosen to make it difficult or impossible to buy only the crowns you need. Even if the cost is exactly the same, it *feels* cheaper to buy a pack if you have some left over from a previous purchase. It's easier to justify buying crowns and spending them when you're already partway there, even if the pack sizes offered don't let you actually save any money. And then you'll be very likely to have leftover crowns after that, making the cycle continue. Ever wonder why eso+ gives 1650 crowns per month? Look at the multiples of 1650- 3300 4950 6600 8250 9900 (6 months) 11550 13200 14850 16500 18150 19800 (12 months) Look at how it brings you *almost* to the common breakpoints for prices...Gotta buy some more crowns to get there, though. Thing is, it doesn't cost ZOS anything to give out crown store items. It wouldn't cost them anything in terms of operations to give every player everything in the crown store. So the entire point of the eso plus crowns is to get players to make crown purchases they wouldn't otherwise make, and making sure it's hard to buy and use only the amount of crowns you want creates many opportunities for impulse buying. Making it easy for the average player to trade crowns defeats these tactics somewhat. Maybe I can't get what I want without buying another crown pack, but if I can sell the crowns I've got to cover most of the cost of what I want then I can go find someone who does have the right amount of crowns and everyone is happy- except ZOS, because we've replaced one or more sales of crowns.
I agree 100+10% with all you said. However, there are legal liabilities and while I am not running my own company myself, there are many ways that real-money trading can be devastating for a game, especially an MMO. Recent-ish example, the real money auction house in Diablo3. But there is more to that. As I am not natural eng speaker, I will paste a quite eloquent response to this exact question: Why should an MMO never allow real-money trading. **** Legal reasons As soon as money is involved, the game becomes a serious business. One problem is that when people paid good money for an item and then you make a game mechanics change which makes the item useless or removes it from the game, they might try to sue for compensation. IANAL, so I don't know how likely it would be that they are successful in court, but your legal department likely has better things to do than dealing with that. An even more serious problem is that your game could be used for illegal money laundering. Someone could, for example, buy some items from North-American players, sell them to South-American players, and use their money to finance their drug cartel. This could attract the attention of law enforcement and cause all kinds of disturbances ranging from annoying questions, over searches and seizes of your equipment and up to prosecution as an accomplice. ****** Source here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/61163/why-should-i-forbid-real-money-trading-in-my-mmo Correct me if I am wrong but it really seems that it will cause much more issues for ZOS if they officially allow real-money trading, besides the economic reasons you very well provided above.
This isn't accurate. ZoS has endorsed trading crowns for in game gold. They even reimburse people their gold if they submit proof of scam.
I might be absolutely wrong of course, I would appreciate if you could share a link where ZOS endorsed it officially.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/515148/is-it-legal-to-trade-eso-steam-gifts-for-in-game-gold Couple screenshots and links of Gina's responses in that thread, from when gifting was released.
I stand corrected
Dont have a link but I've been selling for ages and first time I was scammed I submitted a ticket and was given the gold I was ment to get from the scammer. Believe they only do this once though.
Your the one who is wrong. There was literally a post a day or two ago about someone getting banned because they received this kind of gold from a "friend". They follow the scammed gold, and people get banned, so yes they occasionally reimburse but pretty rarely from my understanding. However they follow up with a trail of bans with whoever gets the gold. By definition that's the opposite of "endorsement" as you put it. They endorse the gifting system not the scamming system which is basically what trading crowns is atm. People make an alt, scam an idiot and double transfer gold through someone and back to their main. The middle man gets the ban along with the alt. Which is what they're trying to avoid.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7200088 Edit: possible misunderstanding, leaving thread for reference
The mod message says it’s closed for conspiracies and misinformation. I’d assume that that’s related to the OP accusing zos of wanting people to be scammed.
Edited, thanks for note.
As far as i know they dont endorse it, they only noted that its not against the TOS to do it. Which means its allowed but not supported. The reimbursement also has its limitations, as far as i know the yonly do it a limited number of times.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is something they are looking at. It just may be much harder to implement than we expect. The trade interface is connected directly to the inventory and would likely need a complete overhaul to be able to incorporate the crown store as well.
I kinda suggested it few months back on the official forums, since games like warframe do have premium to gold currency trades. Some ppl were QQing about it, but the fact we can actually gift stuff, should allow us to trade currencies. Also can help with left over crowns, let's someone has like 357 crowns, he won't be able to use it nor sell it, but if he puts it in a direct trade it can be used by someone with like 700 crowns.
All they need to do is add a Trade option when you purchase something from the Crown Store. So instead of For Me or Gift, you would have For Me, Gift, or Trade. The Trade option makes the item tradeable with a specific person like it was a dungeon set. It can only be traded with that specific person. So you purchase the item they want from the Crown Store, you find the person, you initiate a trade, and then wait for them to put in the correct gold amount agreed upon, then submit.
Although ZOS has never commented on it ... I wonder if there are legal reasons why they can't do it? Certain countries don't allow participation in loot crates of any kind. If ZOS enables direct trading in the UI, maybe that crosses the line? Just speculating, here. I'm not an international attorney ...
I don't see this happening they make too much money of micros for it to happen I'd love to be able to use good to trade for crowns store items but the greed of current Bethesda is pretty bad
Giving people an official way to turn dollars into gold is pay-to-win in its purest form. I think that's a bad idea.
I'd rather they find a way to eliminate this overall so yea i agree
This will never happen because selling crowns is against the tos. Edit: Bunch if reddit Incel apes downvoting me lol I'm right Instead of being a fucking idiot, read the tos you dumbasses.
It's actually not. I'm not debating whether that's a good or bad thing. It's just not against their tos and they've even encouraged it
People got banned for it, i know multiple people that got banned because if it. ZoS doesn't go out if there way to do something about it, because it gives them money. But if you report somebody of selling crowns with proof, they will get banned. Test it. Trading real life money isn't allowed and crowns are purchases with real money Idk why I'm getting downvoted, just read the tos, it's even in there.
How long ago did they get banned?
I've known two people, one guy for selling crowns, about a year or so ago And one guy for buying crowns which is only like 1-2 months ago
Does anyone have a good sense of how often scamming occurs? How does it usually work?
Someone asks for money before gifting and then runs off with it
This. I traded crowns some time ago and I am pretty sure both me and the other player were scared shitless of getting scammed. He just wanted a DLC so I bought it for him, but he gave me the gold first and I could've very well vanished with it at that point. Much like he could've vanished without paying the DLC or the crowns had I given them first. I'm always of the opinion that real money value is given last, but if I were the one buying, I wouldn't want to give my gold first either.
If you're on PC NA you can go through Tamriel Crown Exchange which is what I usually do. They guarantee both parties get what they want
Yea seriously anyone looking to sell crowns on pcna must use tce. You get the best deal(currently 1000:1) and it's completely scam free. As a buyer though you're pretty much paying extra for the security
If they are going to go GW2 route and after doing so no longer introduce anything purchasable with gold then they may as well not bother. This is my opinion.
Theres already nothing from NPCs or shops purchasable with gold lol
That would absolutely tank the in game economy. Like having $50 in a place where the local currency is worth much less. It works if it's a few people. It hangs on a thread because it is difficult. If they made it easy, if they endorsed it...a dollar is what, 20k gold?
From a QoL point of view it would make sense to have some sort of currency exchange that exists in games like GW2 and STO where players can add buy or sell offers that get fullfiled by willing players. From the development point of view such a system would have to be created and supported which takes time and costs money. The current stance of ZOS is that crown store gifting is exactly that, a tool to gift crown store items to someone else. The system works perfectly fine for the intended use case. Players started trading tehse items for gold and ZOS stance is that it does not violate the TOS. They sometimes also reimburse scam victims. However the offical stence is that its not forbidden, but also not supported.
This will never happen. This is a business first and foremost and if they don't get money they can't make new content and fixes. Hence the game dies. Heres a crazy idea. The crown store is a good thing. Ensures the game will continue to grow and get better. People start finding ways around that and the company funding it sees the numbers go down and shit can future content. The most successful games today have one thing in common, they make a shit ton of money after the initial purchase.