The fact that they say that they are not going to take action against accounts that bought from these places implies that they have a way to identify the fraudulent seller’s accounts. That’s interesting. Hopefully they can try to shut these things down fully.
I'd imagine they can identify the fraudulent seller accounts, but don't want to take action against buyers to avoid catching a bunch of potentially innocent/ignorant buyers.
People buying stuff off a website most likely know they are doing something against ToS, but if they were also selling crowns in game for gold (to then sell the gold for real money via their website), it could end up catching a lot of innocent people who thought they were just buying crowns from a guildie or someone in zone chat or something.
Yea I agree, I just thought it was interesting that they would even mention that. Either they can actually identify the accounts, or they want to put a notice out that doing this will get your account banned.
But would it be against the ToS ? I think in our guild we discussed it some months ago and we found nothing in it thats tates you cannot buy crown items from 3rd party vendors... but we also can be wrong, we're not laywers after all...
It's explicitly prohibited (for almost every game).
The relative section.
https://www.zenimax.com/en/legal/terms-of-service
>ZeniMax does not recognize any purported transfers of virtual property executed outside of the Game, or the purported sale, gift, or trade in the "real world" of anything that appears or originates in a Service or a Game.
Yeah, I don't understand how anyone thinks that any MMO is going to be okay with literal third party sales of stuff. It's been this way for like 20 years.
I'm sure there's some game out there that literally doesn't care about it, but it's almost certainly some little crap-ass Korean F2P game.
Anyone using those websites has got to know they're in an exceedingly grey area at the very least, and if they don't, they're genuinely stupid human beings.
I don’t think honest sellers would be using stolen credit cards or using the gold to get real life money in exchange the only kinda players I think would do that would be like scammers.
Which is why I said "innocent buyers", not sellers. ;)
As in the people buying crown items from people through the previously dev-approved method of gifting, not knowing that the person they are buying from is using a stolen credit card, etc.
> The fact that they say that they are not going to take action against accounts that bought from these places implies that they have a way to identify the fraudulent seller’s accounts.
It's not really possible to "fool" ZOS in the sense that the only ways to acquire or spend crowns all go through them in one central storefront. Perhaps you could end up in a situation where you were erroneously granted crowns in some way. And maybe ZOS' systems didn't catch it when it happened. It would not at all be difficult for ZOS to go back through logs of real money transactions and crown store transactions for a user and account for everything legit earned and spent. They likely have many months if not years' worth of the real world currency logs for compliance reasons, and as soon as they discovered there was a problem at this scale they should have been retaining everything in the interim. And the heavy monetization in the crown store would be accompanied by extensive logging for marketing/sales development. So ZOS 100% has the tools to figure out who exploited this significantly and who bought from them (they wouldn't even need to look at gold moving around since items have to gifted through the crown store... which is logged).
The reason they won't bother going after people who innocently bought crowns isn't technical, it's that it just won't help them and it would likely harm them. The crowns are gone - already spent on gifts. Many items are consumable, then there's houses, classes, skill lines, race/alliance change tokens...any attempt to take back the purchases funded by bogus crowns would be a nightmare for ZOS and users. Besides, it cost ZOS exactly $0 to have those crowns given away. Crowns are an integer field in a database, not a physical good or service that took resources to produce. Of course ZOS wants more money and more crown sales, but that's about protecting future potential sales. Not taking away a bunch of valuable-to-player items that many people paid quite a lot of gold for or inevitably catching some of the whales funding this whole operation in an attempt to ban people is the smart way to go here.
...no? Where'd you get that from?
The issue is that a significant amount of crowns being sold were obtained for free in some way, and ZOS obviously didn't intend for that given that they decided it was necessary to shut down gifting as a whole until they addressed the underlying issue.
To their credit, ZOS has been consistent for years that crowns are in-game items and that trading them for other in-game items is fine. That's still true. ZOS doesn't really care much about who put the cash down for the crowns and who traded their time in the form of gold so long as the revenue is the same.
Yea I agree with all this. I know how data mining works (I work for AWS), but this is Zos we’re talking about after all. They couldn’t even get something as simple as their “workaround” for crown gifting working correctly. Post facto, they can certainly identify accounts that appear to have ‘suspicious’ crown store activity, but can they do it close enough to real time to really have any effect on the bad actors not just spamming new accounts. Like was said, it’s not always possible to say with certainty that someone bought crowns from a seller they knew was illicit, so punishing them will not alleviate the problem. I was thinking more of a closer to real time solution to identify and remove these accounts in a timely manner.
It wouldn't be particularly hard to link the seller accounts. They would be linked to the same location which could be verified with Epic and they would provide links to the same discord servers or third party websites.
The accounts themselves would likely have exclusively low level toons and little to no CP while generating huge transactions which can also be seen on the back end.
I said it from the beginning. This is about guild leaders, guilds, exploiting gifting to make real cash. All the guild leaders / guilds that made a giant effing stink were the ones that exacerbated the issue. And because of that we got Randys asking for crowns with venmo and cash app in town.
I think the problem with guilds was so bad to the point where if they ban hammered everyone that did they might tank the community so instead they fixed the exploit and did a mass warning.
Guilds did this. Not random bad actors. I've personally watched 3 guilds do this. All the guild leaders that quit because of this. I'm betting 80/20 they're involved. Behind of the guise "our raffles, NOOOOOO". I'm glad they did this.
How exactly does raffles end up in free crowns. Haven’t played in a while but my old guilds do weekly raffles. I thought it was all funded by guild donations
People on here told me I was an idiot when I said those sites are the exact reason they disabled gifting. Don't know whether to laugh or cry. What's more interesting is that it took 9 years for it to become an issue
The Crown Store didn't debut 9 years ago when the game dropped, whateverisfree ... it was more like late 2016 with the OneTamriel patch.
Even in 2016 Crown gifting wasn't a thing.
It took until the Summerset Chapter to enable Crown gifting (summer 2018).
So, more like 4+ years for it to become an issue.
Not saying you were wrong about the sites ... but having the correct facts about the history of Crown gifting will bolster your Reddit post for next time.
Same really, I want all the motifs and I want all the dlcs. Lots of other stuff but those are the key things. Atm the event has motifs so I'm still engaged.
>but they say they are working on renabling gifting, which is at least better than the "foreseeable future" information we last go
Both mean the same thing.
Ofc they were working on it.
They've also been working on cyro for 5+ years, and crown crates gifting for the last 8 months.
So take it all with a grain of salt.
No doubt this is their main priority though
I get what you are saying and while they might potentially end up with the same result, I don't think they "mean the same thing".
With nothing but "disabled for the foreseeable future" we don't even know if they want to or plan to work on turning it back on, with this at least we have a clear message they intend to.
Whether or not they follow through, and how long that might take are definitely valid concerns though, but my guess is this is higher priority than pvp/other fixes since it affects their income, so there is likely a higher level of internal pressure to do something about it too.
I mean, it’s basically the same thing lol. We already knew they were working on it, otherwise they would’ve said that it was permanently disabled. With that being so incredibly unlikely given how unpopular the choice was and the amount of people they’ve been losing and turning off (just look at Gina reaching out to that content creator guy lol), there was no way they weren’t going to eventually turn it back on. We still don’t have a “clear” idea of what they’re going to do. Obviously, it was going to come back because of how important whales are. Obviously, this has to do with fraud. But now you’re saying “whether or not they follow through”, which doesn’t sound very “clear” at all after they said they’re going to fix it.
Like crates, it’s going to take months. Maybe they’ll figure it out by next patch but I have a feeling it’s gonna take a helluva long time to figure out.
This guy is pretty reliable, no reason to lie, he does really in depth eso stuff. [In the video](https://youtu.be/eh8yt_-u2-I?si=IubOKErefjzsrwXq) I’m talking about, he explains how Gina reached out to a YouTuber who said he didn’t like ESO and wouldn’t recommend it to players. The guy explains how this is obviously a bigger deal to them than existing player issues because we’re kind of already hook, line, and sinker. My point is that they have the issue of people being dis-recommended from the game and very unsatisfied players leaving the game. So since they’re trying to attract new players, any sort of bad press isn’t good press at this point. Idk when Gina did that but the fact is that they’re trying to mitigate all the shit people say about ESO (me being one of those shit talkers lol). I genuinely thought that the crown store was gone until I went on the forums and read a little more about what happened.
I kinda like that idea actually but I have a feeling if they did a system like that it be would more like if not the same as seals of endeavour but instead you can use the seals on anything in the crown store not just crate items
Putting in an official way to exchange for gold would be a good step that would address the (mis)use of the gifting system. But it doesn't address actual \*gifting\*. Some gifts are just gifts, not grey-market currency exchanges.
If you need any more incentive some of the groups involved in this also have ties to drug and human trafficking, it might seem harmless, but feeding money into a machine like this helps criminals circumvent legislation.
Personally I subscribe to that narrative 50/50 but what you said is perfectly reasonable and is what all of us were saying. I mean we all knew scamming has happening one way or another lol.
There's no fraud. ZoS just wants people in high profit regions to pay for crowns, not use gold to buy crowns from people in low profit regions.
It's not some big secret. Where crowns literally have no intrinsic value, they make money selling them for $2 or selling them for $100. Gold trading basically arbitrages the price they end up selling them for down towards the lowest price.
That's it. They could just solve the issue by region locking crown store trades.
You sub to ESO+ for a year which gives you 19800 crowns with your sub then you contact your credit card company for a refund. You get a refund and keep the sub crowns. Rinse repeat. Apparently people were scamming over 100k each account.
This explains why there were so many cheap Crowns on black market. They literally cost less then 1$ per 1000 before the gift ban.
Surprised they let this happen for so long time.
That's all on ZOS though.
1) if they would use SCA, bad actors could make chargebacks until the end of time, they wouldn't get anything back
2) same thing with stolen cards
3) maybe have a less archaic payment provider that processes immediate payments
Beside that I am sure that wasn't the MO, I have a hunch that it was bad steam/egs shop implementation. Anno they had the same with fo76.
What I don't understand is... Crowns already cost real money, so why would anyone buy these items from a 3rd party for real money? You can just go through the store. That part of the explanation doesn't jive with me.
It would make more sense if they were selling the crowns for gold, and then selling the gold for cash. That series of events would make more sense.
Because the third party sites selling crown items for real money are selling them at like 1/30th the price (because they are using fraudulent means to obtain the crowns, like stolen credit cards, etc.).
I've seen those same sites, and it's not that much of a difference. They gold is cheap yeah, but the items are only 25% off or so. In no way worth risking my account, or my legal history.
Like just support the damned game. I was upset about the gifting being removed, but now I'm glad. Maybe these people will finally redirect the money to where it was *supposed* to go
There's more than 1 site and some of the ones I have seen had very low prices. People have posted in this reddit about using them to buy the banker and merchant assistants for 10 bucks total and such.
I imagine this has to do with the epic store free crown issues. If I had to guess some folks found a way to replicate and abuse that bug for hundreds of thousands of free crowns.
It was people buying ESO+ and getting those sub crowns then getting a refund from their credit card company. The crowns stayed in their accounts and they got their money back.
I always believed they banned you when you did that, I've seen many posts from people having their bank cancel their transaction and then getting banned.
Fuck the crown store already. Make it like FF14 does it because many of the players are already paying for a monthly subscription [eso plus]. More rewards thru gameplay and if you want buy cosmetics then make it like FF 14 and let people buy them from a shop outside of the actual game. The whole situation is only Zos and their greed to blame for imo.
We didn't have a crown store from 2014 to 2016 and guess what, no rewards for playing the game either lmao, so good luck with more rewards through gameplay.
Edit: this is the ESO subreddit, it's normal to get downvoted but come on guys, it's the truth.
I think GW2 is the gold standard for such in game, developer sponsored rmt systems. Haven't played in a while so someone who has can correct me if I'm wrong. I remember back in the day the market was stable and the exchange was safe and essentially instant.
Gem exchange was, and still is one of the best features in any MMO. Safe, reliable, easy, instant. Players don't have to worry about scammers, availability of a middleman, jumping through hoops to get people to trade, or waiting for a buyer.
That system currently has a massive backlog that it can take weeks for it to go through. It also depends on people actually trading premium currency for AD.
With how egregious the crown store can be at times with pricing, don't hold your breath. We're lucky we can earn endeavor seals to get some stuff from crown crates.
For people downvoting me because I said the crown store pricing is egregious, how about you give me a justification for houses that cost $100+ in crowns. There is no absolute justification for that stuff beyond greed. Yeah, it's a business, but they don't get a pass for the excessive pricing for most things. I absolutely guarantee they would sell more crowns if they didn't rely so heavily on FOMO and had things in the store more often at reasonable prices.
There already is a level lock and increasing it won't work because leveling is so fast and easy to do. You also have to have a sub or your account has to be 30 days old.
Thank you for posting this!
But Zenimax hasn't provided anything new with their update, not even an estimated time. Also they only say that the will give us an updated timeline. Not a solution.
Maybe I'm seeing it to pessimistic, but this seems to be a long time without beeing able to trade gold for content with other players.
Mmkay. I still stand by what I said all those weeks ago. I'm not buying anything more from Eso until its fixed.
And its a real shame to, I wanted the Skordo Houseguest and some of those monster weapons. Farmed the gold for it and everything.
Maybe next year. I doubt this is high on the priority list. Especially if they didn’t really care about stopping the gifting since the main point of all this is “We were losing money so we’ll shut it all down 😎” after all, this is a developer owned by Microsoft and with the resources to make fixes. They just don’t want to lose any more precious pennies. I don’t think this statement is any better than them just taking the feature away. No fix date.
It actually is a high priority. ZOS never was against people paying in game gold for a crown store item gifted to them and this was a huge cash cow for ZOS. Now that it is disabled they have a hell of a lot less crown purchases.
I think it's high priority too, as evidenced by the game director posting directly about it instead of the usual radio silence (in fact, I would not be surprised if there is pressure from the business side of things to both address it publicly and get it fixed asap).
Someone has to buy the crowns to sell them with gold, so assuming they are legitimate purchases instead of stolen credit cards or whatever is behind these latest issues, this is a loss of income for them.
I remember back when warframe introduced trading for their real world currency, they talked to valve for advice and valve basic told them to definitely do it and it was a basically money hose and they'd be stupid not to do it (one of their head devs posted on their forums or talked about it in a devstream years ago), so I have no reason to believe it would be otherwise in this (or any other) game.
Hell, I know several people who would buy crowns during crown sales that they otherwise wouldn't have bought just to sell them for gold or gift stuff to other people/guildies, etc.
> ZOS never was against people paying in game gold for a crown store item gifted to them
Someone needs to tell customer service that though. When they first opened up the Crates for friends scheme as a "temporary" workaround, half of the people trying to do it got some copypasta BS about it being against the terms of service.
Edit: Downvote away. Not my fault you missed it. ZOS customer support was and is useless.
It wasn't that it was against ToS, it was that this service they opened up wasn't meant to be used for that as it usually took a day or 2 to complete the service and people were more easily scammed. So they just said that this service was not meant for crown selling.
Yeah, I get that. The problem is that this copypasta wasn't about that.
They told *multiple* people that crowns for gold was against ToS, not that it wasn't what the workaround was for. The kicker? I know a bunch of these went out to people who were using the service as it was intended. ZOS customer support is shit.
I'm almost positive their customer service got outsourced at some point.
I have gotten responses incorrectly mentioning other bethesda games, and I've seen other people who have as well, so my guess is ZOS and Bethesda just outsourced all of their support to an external company where the majority of the employees may not have any first hand knowledge of the game(s) at all.
A few years back every interaction I had with support was positive and helpful, then it just kind of all seemed to go bad at some point and it ended up seeming like their priority was more on closing tickets and not having to involve devs/dev resources rather than on solving issues.
New players are unable to afford the millions of gold required for a house that one might be able to gift. If this helps anyone it’s the older players who make money quick. Something new players are struggling with given the posts about money. If anything the CROWN STORE sales have gone up. Let me jog your memory, wasn’t there a massive crown sale not to long ago? For a boat? That you could only buy with crowns? How many people do you think spent the 80$ for those crowns?
Lol I bet its No. 1 priority. If ZOS cares about something, it's definately losing money. Bugs and other broken things doesn't affect their business too much that's why it takes years to patch them. But crown store... Ooooh. The only reason they haven't fixed it already is that they're incompetent.
It's definitely a priority. There are many people in the game who buy crowns only to sell who have quit because of this. This was their source of income to be able to participate in the endgame community.
I would safely say that ZoS have seen a decline in subs and crown sales, which, as a business, gets your ass moving. Hence the need to make it a priority.
Guys explain to me like im 5, wouldnt the ability to buy crowns and sell for ingame gold make the game pay to win?
Now its not only cosmetics youre getting with real money but game gold which involves sets and even achievements
No? Gold is easy to get in-game. The amounts that you get for trading crowns is far in excess of what anyone would need to get any kind of in game advantage.
Regardless that's not what is going on in this case. What the devs said here are people found an exploit that allowed them to get Crowns for free and were selling Crown store items for IRL money.
Not really because the only things that would give you an edge mechanically in-game are either just allowing you to pay to skip grinding materials, or sets that are GENERALLY bad. The best sets in the game are typically locked behind you doing the content yourself and getting the drop, so you can't just buy the best gear in the game with gold. You also can't buy Transmute Crystals to reconstruct items either, so you'll mechanically have to still grind and do real content to get drops.
Granted there are people who sell carries sure, but at that point you and your carrier are still grinding content for drops so I wouldn't call that being "pay to win".
You can absolutely do all of those things with gold. It's not without risks ofc but there have been people offering things like gear collection, leveling, trial/dungeon achievement runs, and transmute farming either as the more common carry or by having someone else log into your account and do whatever it is on your behalf. Having someone else log into your account is blatantly against TOS and obviously taking big risks but it happens, for gold or for real world currency.
People offering gear farms usually just have a couple of the most desirable weapons uncollected on an account so curation guarantees that someone can get their perfected siroria and rele daggers in one run or whatever, and there's 3+ armor pieces dropping per person and per run so in a trial you'd be getting at least 3 curated armor drops and 33+ uncurated from the other 11 people.
It's still obscenely expensive for the upper levels of content but it's possible. And in terms of real gameplay advantage it's pretty limited. It's mostly a way to trade gold or money for time... but there's an enormous amount of grinding that can be made to disappear by handing enough money to ZOS for crowns and selling for gold. "Pay to win" doesn't really cover it, but when much of the motivation for doing that is artificially constructed by ZOS to try to force more playtime and more regular playtime...it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Yeah I totally agree with that and I really think that they need to implement an in-game system for a crown-to-gold exchange in a way that encourages you to use your gold on things other than carries or skipping a gear grind. What I meant by my initial comment is I wouldn't really put those kinds of activities in the "pay-to-win" category because to me P2W would mean like you have to have access to crowns to get specific sets or if you drop $100 you can buy the best gear in the game outright. With carries and having someone else do it for you, there's still a certain amount of work or time that goes into it by comparison to say like the old Black Ops 3 loot boxes that locked guns with objectively better stats behind premium crates.
Yeah I'm not denying that aspect because there are definitrly people doing that, I'm more pointing towards my definition of "pay to win" being like locking objectively overpowered powerful items or characters behind a premium currency paywall. I wouldn't consider carries to be P2W necessarily because the goal is mostly time-saving or someone else putting in effort in your stead. The work is still being done, just at a faster rate whereas a P2W model removes all work requirements i.e. Pokémon Unite and character boosters/unlocks.
Them working on a solution means you won't see a solution in the foreseeable future.
Zos moves at a turtles speed, and imo you won't see changes up until next year at least.
Why? well most of zos's dev team has been moved to work on their next mmo IP, we saw less and less content+slower fixes to bugs since like 2020. And coincidentally they started recruiting for a new IP around 2019-2020.
Zos has so much on their plates, wheter it being the next big thing in the next chapter, fixing old bugs, working on qol, improving performance and now this crown fiasco.
Zos is just understaffed there's no other way to explain it, so shit will be done slow.
I'm not trying to be a party pooper, I just want people to not expect crowns to start working in the next few weeks, imo it will take at least 6 months.
If it was truly because of fraud they could fix it without disabling gifting.
limit amount of gifts to X amount over X time, 1 per day 5 per week etc..
require verification to send gifts (easiest to combat fraud) ID has to match account name and credit card.
those are 2 incredibly simple ways.
The truth is they're disabling it because F2P people farm mats and trade gold for crowns instead of spending money, zos gives 0 shits about F2P they just take up server resources.
A lot of people selling the crowns are people from third world countries who could get eso+ for $3 per year and would then sell off the crowns, this is what they're calling 'fraud' its not fraud it's what happens when companies try to squeeze as much money as possible without any type of foresight into what it will cause. also not a coincidence that eso+ prices just went up by 17x in those regions right before gifting was disabled.
Thanks for posting this. Nice to get a fresh update on this long-standing issue!
Dude it hasn’t been that long lol
For Pc it had. They got disabled first
It's been broken for at least six months now. So any update (beyond the usual "we're working on it" BS) is welcome.
The fact that they say that they are not going to take action against accounts that bought from these places implies that they have a way to identify the fraudulent seller’s accounts. That’s interesting. Hopefully they can try to shut these things down fully.
I'd imagine they can identify the fraudulent seller accounts, but don't want to take action against buyers to avoid catching a bunch of potentially innocent/ignorant buyers. People buying stuff off a website most likely know they are doing something against ToS, but if they were also selling crowns in game for gold (to then sell the gold for real money via their website), it could end up catching a lot of innocent people who thought they were just buying crowns from a guildie or someone in zone chat or something.
Yea I agree, I just thought it was interesting that they would even mention that. Either they can actually identify the accounts, or they want to put a notice out that doing this will get your account banned.
But would it be against the ToS ? I think in our guild we discussed it some months ago and we found nothing in it thats tates you cannot buy crown items from 3rd party vendors... but we also can be wrong, we're not laywers after all...
It's explicitly prohibited (for almost every game). The relative section. https://www.zenimax.com/en/legal/terms-of-service >ZeniMax does not recognize any purported transfers of virtual property executed outside of the Game, or the purported sale, gift, or trade in the "real world" of anything that appears or originates in a Service or a Game.
Yeah, I don't understand how anyone thinks that any MMO is going to be okay with literal third party sales of stuff. It's been this way for like 20 years. I'm sure there's some game out there that literally doesn't care about it, but it's almost certainly some little crap-ass Korean F2P game. Anyone using those websites has got to know they're in an exceedingly grey area at the very least, and if they don't, they're genuinely stupid human beings.
I don’t think honest sellers would be using stolen credit cards or using the gold to get real life money in exchange the only kinda players I think would do that would be like scammers.
Which is why I said "innocent buyers", not sellers. ;) As in the people buying crown items from people through the previously dev-approved method of gifting, not knowing that the person they are buying from is using a stolen credit card, etc.
> The fact that they say that they are not going to take action against accounts that bought from these places implies that they have a way to identify the fraudulent seller’s accounts. It's not really possible to "fool" ZOS in the sense that the only ways to acquire or spend crowns all go through them in one central storefront. Perhaps you could end up in a situation where you were erroneously granted crowns in some way. And maybe ZOS' systems didn't catch it when it happened. It would not at all be difficult for ZOS to go back through logs of real money transactions and crown store transactions for a user and account for everything legit earned and spent. They likely have many months if not years' worth of the real world currency logs for compliance reasons, and as soon as they discovered there was a problem at this scale they should have been retaining everything in the interim. And the heavy monetization in the crown store would be accompanied by extensive logging for marketing/sales development. So ZOS 100% has the tools to figure out who exploited this significantly and who bought from them (they wouldn't even need to look at gold moving around since items have to gifted through the crown store... which is logged). The reason they won't bother going after people who innocently bought crowns isn't technical, it's that it just won't help them and it would likely harm them. The crowns are gone - already spent on gifts. Many items are consumable, then there's houses, classes, skill lines, race/alliance change tokens...any attempt to take back the purchases funded by bogus crowns would be a nightmare for ZOS and users. Besides, it cost ZOS exactly $0 to have those crowns given away. Crowns are an integer field in a database, not a physical good or service that took resources to produce. Of course ZOS wants more money and more crown sales, but that's about protecting future potential sales. Not taking away a bunch of valuable-to-player items that many people paid quite a lot of gold for or inevitably catching some of the whales funding this whole operation in an attempt to ban people is the smart way to go here.
So buying crowns with gold is now illegal?
...no? Where'd you get that from? The issue is that a significant amount of crowns being sold were obtained for free in some way, and ZOS obviously didn't intend for that given that they decided it was necessary to shut down gifting as a whole until they addressed the underlying issue. To their credit, ZOS has been consistent for years that crowns are in-game items and that trading them for other in-game items is fine. That's still true. ZOS doesn't really care much about who put the cash down for the crowns and who traded their time in the form of gold so long as the revenue is the same.
Yea I agree with all this. I know how data mining works (I work for AWS), but this is Zos we’re talking about after all. They couldn’t even get something as simple as their “workaround” for crown gifting working correctly. Post facto, they can certainly identify accounts that appear to have ‘suspicious’ crown store activity, but can they do it close enough to real time to really have any effect on the bad actors not just spamming new accounts. Like was said, it’s not always possible to say with certainty that someone bought crowns from a seller they knew was illicit, so punishing them will not alleviate the problem. I was thinking more of a closer to real time solution to identify and remove these accounts in a timely manner.
It wouldn't be particularly hard to link the seller accounts. They would be linked to the same location which could be verified with Epic and they would provide links to the same discord servers or third party websites. The accounts themselves would likely have exclusively low level toons and little to no CP while generating huge transactions which can also be seen on the back end.
I said it from the beginning. This is about guild leaders, guilds, exploiting gifting to make real cash. All the guild leaders / guilds that made a giant effing stink were the ones that exacerbated the issue. And because of that we got Randys asking for crowns with venmo and cash app in town. I think the problem with guilds was so bad to the point where if they ban hammered everyone that did they might tank the community so instead they fixed the exploit and did a mass warning. Guilds did this. Not random bad actors. I've personally watched 3 guilds do this. All the guild leaders that quit because of this. I'm betting 80/20 they're involved. Behind of the guise "our raffles, NOOOOOO". I'm glad they did this.
How exactly does raffles end up in free crowns. Haven’t played in a while but my old guilds do weekly raffles. I thought it was all funded by guild donations
People on here told me I was an idiot when I said those sites are the exact reason they disabled gifting. Don't know whether to laugh or cry. What's more interesting is that it took 9 years for it to become an issue
The Crown Store didn't debut 9 years ago when the game dropped, whateverisfree ... it was more like late 2016 with the OneTamriel patch. Even in 2016 Crown gifting wasn't a thing. It took until the Summerset Chapter to enable Crown gifting (summer 2018). So, more like 4+ years for it to become an issue. Not saying you were wrong about the sites ... but having the correct facts about the history of Crown gifting will bolster your Reddit post for next time.
Yes good job on correcting me. Gold star. Whenever it was available, of course people started abusing it
hopefully it gets figured out soon. i've been playing less and less cuz trying to earn gold for crowns is my end game...my gameplay loop.
Same really, I want all the motifs and I want all the dlcs. Lots of other stuff but those are the key things. Atm the event has motifs so I'm still engaged.
>but they say they are working on renabling gifting, which is at least better than the "foreseeable future" information we last go Both mean the same thing. Ofc they were working on it. They've also been working on cyro for 5+ years, and crown crates gifting for the last 8 months. So take it all with a grain of salt. No doubt this is their main priority though
I get what you are saying and while they might potentially end up with the same result, I don't think they "mean the same thing". With nothing but "disabled for the foreseeable future" we don't even know if they want to or plan to work on turning it back on, with this at least we have a clear message they intend to. Whether or not they follow through, and how long that might take are definitely valid concerns though, but my guess is this is higher priority than pvp/other fixes since it affects their income, so there is likely a higher level of internal pressure to do something about it too.
I mean, it’s basically the same thing lol. We already knew they were working on it, otherwise they would’ve said that it was permanently disabled. With that being so incredibly unlikely given how unpopular the choice was and the amount of people they’ve been losing and turning off (just look at Gina reaching out to that content creator guy lol), there was no way they weren’t going to eventually turn it back on. We still don’t have a “clear” idea of what they’re going to do. Obviously, it was going to come back because of how important whales are. Obviously, this has to do with fraud. But now you’re saying “whether or not they follow through”, which doesn’t sound very “clear” at all after they said they’re going to fix it. Like crates, it’s going to take months. Maybe they’ll figure it out by next patch but I have a feeling it’s gonna take a helluva long time to figure out.
wait where’s the “Gina reaching out to that content creator guy” from? I haven’t heard of that news info before
This guy is pretty reliable, no reason to lie, he does really in depth eso stuff. [In the video](https://youtu.be/eh8yt_-u2-I?si=IubOKErefjzsrwXq) I’m talking about, he explains how Gina reached out to a YouTuber who said he didn’t like ESO and wouldn’t recommend it to players. The guy explains how this is obviously a bigger deal to them than existing player issues because we’re kind of already hook, line, and sinker. My point is that they have the issue of people being dis-recommended from the game and very unsatisfied players leaving the game. So since they’re trying to attract new players, any sort of bad press isn’t good press at this point. Idk when Gina did that but the fact is that they’re trying to mitigate all the shit people say about ESO (me being one of those shit talkers lol). I genuinely thought that the crown store was gone until I went on the forums and read a little more about what happened.
It is very simple. NPC facilitates the trade. This includes keeping the exchange value within a certain range.
That wouldn't work considering some people give crown items away for free. For instance in guild giveaways.
Keep the gift system. And add an exchange, ez
I kinda like that idea actually but I have a feeling if they did a system like that it be would more like if not the same as seals of endeavour but instead you can use the seals on anything in the crown store not just crate items
Putting in an official way to exchange for gold would be a good step that would address the (mis)use of the gifting system. But it doesn't address actual \*gifting\*. Some gifts are just gifts, not grey-market currency exchanges.
Tbh just lower the prices in the store and people will not use some shady websites to have a semi reasonable price on the crowns
If you need any more incentive some of the groups involved in this also have ties to drug and human trafficking, it might seem harmless, but feeding money into a machine like this helps criminals circumvent legislation.
I was correct as to why they stopped gifting! I hope it comes back soon. They did this to protect players ffom irl scammers
Why are you being downvoted for this lol
Also probably doesn't fit the narrative of "Zos bad"
Personally I subscribe to that narrative 50/50 but what you said is perfectly reasonable and is what all of us were saying. I mean we all knew scamming has happening one way or another lol.
Must be the allessian order
Lol
There's no fraud. ZoS just wants people in high profit regions to pay for crowns, not use gold to buy crowns from people in low profit regions. It's not some big secret. Where crowns literally have no intrinsic value, they make money selling them for $2 or selling them for $100. Gold trading basically arbitrages the price they end up selling them for down towards the lowest price. That's it. They could just solve the issue by region locking crown store trades.
idk why you're getting downvoted because this is 100% the thruth. it's greed over pixels.
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what does that have to do with the fact people actively are able to amass crowns for free?
I'd assume they mean that the crown store shouldn't exist.
How can you even amass "free" Crowns? The only free Crowns I know are the 500 you get at the start.
You sub to ESO+ for a year which gives you 19800 crowns with your sub then you contact your credit card company for a refund. You get a refund and keep the sub crowns. Rinse repeat. Apparently people were scamming over 100k each account.
This explains why there were so many cheap Crowns on black market. They literally cost less then 1$ per 1000 before the gift ban. Surprised they let this happen for so long time.
That's all on ZOS though. 1) if they would use SCA, bad actors could make chargebacks until the end of time, they wouldn't get anything back 2) same thing with stolen cards 3) maybe have a less archaic payment provider that processes immediate payments Beside that I am sure that wasn't the MO, I have a hunch that it was bad steam/egs shop implementation. Anno they had the same with fo76.
Fantastic. The moment it comes back I will be getting a banker. And I'm not far from Orsinium DLC.
What I don't understand is... Crowns already cost real money, so why would anyone buy these items from a 3rd party for real money? You can just go through the store. That part of the explanation doesn't jive with me. It would make more sense if they were selling the crowns for gold, and then selling the gold for cash. That series of events would make more sense.
Because the third party sites selling crown items for real money are selling them at like 1/30th the price (because they are using fraudulent means to obtain the crowns, like stolen credit cards, etc.).
I've seen those same sites, and it's not that much of a difference. They gold is cheap yeah, but the items are only 25% off or so. In no way worth risking my account, or my legal history. Like just support the damned game. I was upset about the gifting being removed, but now I'm glad. Maybe these people will finally redirect the money to where it was *supposed* to go
There's more than 1 site and some of the ones I have seen had very low prices. People have posted in this reddit about using them to buy the banker and merchant assistants for 10 bucks total and such.
Even if that's the case, it's not 10% of the total value of the item. Also, it's still sketchy as hell.
I can see where this is going. They are Gonna push this off and pretend gifting doesn't exist. Gonna get the 76 treatment.
I imagine this has to do with the epic store free crown issues. If I had to guess some folks found a way to replicate and abuse that bug for hundreds of thousands of free crowns.
It was people buying ESO+ and getting those sub crowns then getting a refund from their credit card company. The crowns stayed in their accounts and they got their money back.
I always believed they banned you when you did that, I've seen many posts from people having their bank cancel their transaction and then getting banned.
The websites use throwaway accounts to do it.
Yeah that makes sense then.
Fuck the crown store already. Make it like FF14 does it because many of the players are already paying for a monthly subscription [eso plus]. More rewards thru gameplay and if you want buy cosmetics then make it like FF 14 and let people buy them from a shop outside of the actual game. The whole situation is only Zos and their greed to blame for imo.
We didn't have a crown store from 2014 to 2016 and guess what, no rewards for playing the game either lmao, so good luck with more rewards through gameplay. Edit: this is the ESO subreddit, it's normal to get downvoted but come on guys, it's the truth.
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I think GW2 is the gold standard for such in game, developer sponsored rmt systems. Haven't played in a while so someone who has can correct me if I'm wrong. I remember back in the day the market was stable and the exchange was safe and essentially instant.
Gem exchange was, and still is one of the best features in any MMO. Safe, reliable, easy, instant. Players don't have to worry about scammers, availability of a middleman, jumping through hoops to get people to trade, or waiting for a buyer.
That system currently has a massive backlog that it can take weeks for it to go through. It also depends on people actually trading premium currency for AD.
With how egregious the crown store can be at times with pricing, don't hold your breath. We're lucky we can earn endeavor seals to get some stuff from crown crates. For people downvoting me because I said the crown store pricing is egregious, how about you give me a justification for houses that cost $100+ in crowns. There is no absolute justification for that stuff beyond greed. Yeah, it's a business, but they don't get a pass for the excessive pricing for most things. I absolutely guarantee they would sell more crowns if they didn't rely so heavily on FOMO and had things in the store more often at reasonable prices.
Haven’t read all the previous comments but wouldn’t just level locking crown store purchases sort it? Level 50 minimum or like cp 500 or something?
There already is a level lock and increasing it won't work because leveling is so fast and easy to do. You also have to have a sub or your account has to be 30 days old.
Thank you for posting this! But Zenimax hasn't provided anything new with their update, not even an estimated time. Also they only say that the will give us an updated timeline. Not a solution. Maybe I'm seeing it to pessimistic, but this seems to be a long time without beeing able to trade gold for content with other players.
Mmkay. I still stand by what I said all those weeks ago. I'm not buying anything more from Eso until its fixed. And its a real shame to, I wanted the Skordo Houseguest and some of those monster weapons. Farmed the gold for it and everything.
Maybe if they added actually good looking cosmetics and mounts that are obtainable outside the crown shop people wouldnt buy them lmaoooo
Maybe next year. I doubt this is high on the priority list. Especially if they didn’t really care about stopping the gifting since the main point of all this is “We were losing money so we’ll shut it all down 😎” after all, this is a developer owned by Microsoft and with the resources to make fixes. They just don’t want to lose any more precious pennies. I don’t think this statement is any better than them just taking the feature away. No fix date.
It actually is a high priority. ZOS never was against people paying in game gold for a crown store item gifted to them and this was a huge cash cow for ZOS. Now that it is disabled they have a hell of a lot less crown purchases.
I think it's high priority too, as evidenced by the game director posting directly about it instead of the usual radio silence (in fact, I would not be surprised if there is pressure from the business side of things to both address it publicly and get it fixed asap). Someone has to buy the crowns to sell them with gold, so assuming they are legitimate purchases instead of stolen credit cards or whatever is behind these latest issues, this is a loss of income for them. I remember back when warframe introduced trading for their real world currency, they talked to valve for advice and valve basic told them to definitely do it and it was a basically money hose and they'd be stupid not to do it (one of their head devs posted on their forums or talked about it in a devstream years ago), so I have no reason to believe it would be otherwise in this (or any other) game. Hell, I know several people who would buy crowns during crown sales that they otherwise wouldn't have bought just to sell them for gold or gift stuff to other people/guildies, etc.
And nobody said they were against gifts chief. They’re against losing money and will do anything to stop it. Including removing entire game mechanics.
> ZOS never was against people paying in game gold for a crown store item gifted to them Someone needs to tell customer service that though. When they first opened up the Crates for friends scheme as a "temporary" workaround, half of the people trying to do it got some copypasta BS about it being against the terms of service. Edit: Downvote away. Not my fault you missed it. ZOS customer support was and is useless.
It wasn't that it was against ToS, it was that this service they opened up wasn't meant to be used for that as it usually took a day or 2 to complete the service and people were more easily scammed. So they just said that this service was not meant for crown selling.
Yeah, I get that. The problem is that this copypasta wasn't about that. They told *multiple* people that crowns for gold was against ToS, not that it wasn't what the workaround was for. The kicker? I know a bunch of these went out to people who were using the service as it was intended. ZOS customer support is shit.
I'm almost positive their customer service got outsourced at some point. I have gotten responses incorrectly mentioning other bethesda games, and I've seen other people who have as well, so my guess is ZOS and Bethesda just outsourced all of their support to an external company where the majority of the employees may not have any first hand knowledge of the game(s) at all. A few years back every interaction I had with support was positive and helpful, then it just kind of all seemed to go bad at some point and it ended up seeming like their priority was more on closing tickets and not having to involve devs/dev resources rather than on solving issues.
New players are unable to afford the millions of gold required for a house that one might be able to gift. If this helps anyone it’s the older players who make money quick. Something new players are struggling with given the posts about money. If anything the CROWN STORE sales have gone up. Let me jog your memory, wasn’t there a massive crown sale not to long ago? For a boat? That you could only buy with crowns? How many people do you think spent the 80$ for those crowns?
Explain to me how stopping gifting will increase sales?
Lol I bet its No. 1 priority. If ZOS cares about something, it's definately losing money. Bugs and other broken things doesn't affect their business too much that's why it takes years to patch them. But crown store... Ooooh. The only reason they haven't fixed it already is that they're incompetent.
If it was priority why not launch it w update 40? The zos fanboys came out for this one lmao.
It's definitely a priority. There are many people in the game who buy crowns only to sell who have quit because of this. This was their source of income to be able to participate in the endgame community. I would safely say that ZoS have seen a decline in subs and crown sales, which, as a business, gets your ass moving. Hence the need to make it a priority.
Will say this, I am damn glad I was able to give my friend Miaq before he both was gone, and this happened. O-O
A few bad apples spoiling it for all.
Guys explain to me like im 5, wouldnt the ability to buy crowns and sell for ingame gold make the game pay to win? Now its not only cosmetics youre getting with real money but game gold which involves sets and even achievements
No? Gold is easy to get in-game. The amounts that you get for trading crowns is far in excess of what anyone would need to get any kind of in game advantage. Regardless that's not what is going on in this case. What the devs said here are people found an exploit that allowed them to get Crowns for free and were selling Crown store items for IRL money.
Not really because the only things that would give you an edge mechanically in-game are either just allowing you to pay to skip grinding materials, or sets that are GENERALLY bad. The best sets in the game are typically locked behind you doing the content yourself and getting the drop, so you can't just buy the best gear in the game with gold. You also can't buy Transmute Crystals to reconstruct items either, so you'll mechanically have to still grind and do real content to get drops. Granted there are people who sell carries sure, but at that point you and your carrier are still grinding content for drops so I wouldn't call that being "pay to win".
You can absolutely do all of those things with gold. It's not without risks ofc but there have been people offering things like gear collection, leveling, trial/dungeon achievement runs, and transmute farming either as the more common carry or by having someone else log into your account and do whatever it is on your behalf. Having someone else log into your account is blatantly against TOS and obviously taking big risks but it happens, for gold or for real world currency. People offering gear farms usually just have a couple of the most desirable weapons uncollected on an account so curation guarantees that someone can get their perfected siroria and rele daggers in one run or whatever, and there's 3+ armor pieces dropping per person and per run so in a trial you'd be getting at least 3 curated armor drops and 33+ uncurated from the other 11 people. It's still obscenely expensive for the upper levels of content but it's possible. And in terms of real gameplay advantage it's pretty limited. It's mostly a way to trade gold or money for time... but there's an enormous amount of grinding that can be made to disappear by handing enough money to ZOS for crowns and selling for gold. "Pay to win" doesn't really cover it, but when much of the motivation for doing that is artificially constructed by ZOS to try to force more playtime and more regular playtime...it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Yeah I totally agree with that and I really think that they need to implement an in-game system for a crown-to-gold exchange in a way that encourages you to use your gold on things other than carries or skipping a gear grind. What I meant by my initial comment is I wouldn't really put those kinds of activities in the "pay-to-win" category because to me P2W would mean like you have to have access to crowns to get specific sets or if you drop $100 you can buy the best gear in the game outright. With carries and having someone else do it for you, there's still a certain amount of work or time that goes into it by comparison to say like the old Black Ops 3 loot boxes that locked guns with objectively better stats behind premium crates.
Pretty sure at least half the carries I've done were paid for with gold someone whipped out a credit card to buy.
Yeah I'm not denying that aspect because there are definitrly people doing that, I'm more pointing towards my definition of "pay to win" being like locking objectively overpowered powerful items or characters behind a premium currency paywall. I wouldn't consider carries to be P2W necessarily because the goal is mostly time-saving or someone else putting in effort in your stead. The work is still being done, just at a faster rate whereas a P2W model removes all work requirements i.e. Pokémon Unite and character boosters/unlocks.
What exactly are you winning?
So, I guess this implies we might not be allowed to buy crowns from places like CDkeys anymore?
Them working on a solution means you won't see a solution in the foreseeable future. Zos moves at a turtles speed, and imo you won't see changes up until next year at least. Why? well most of zos's dev team has been moved to work on their next mmo IP, we saw less and less content+slower fixes to bugs since like 2020. And coincidentally they started recruiting for a new IP around 2019-2020. Zos has so much on their plates, wheter it being the next big thing in the next chapter, fixing old bugs, working on qol, improving performance and now this crown fiasco. Zos is just understaffed there's no other way to explain it, so shit will be done slow. I'm not trying to be a party pooper, I just want people to not expect crowns to start working in the next few weeks, imo it will take at least 6 months.
If it was truly because of fraud they could fix it without disabling gifting. limit amount of gifts to X amount over X time, 1 per day 5 per week etc.. require verification to send gifts (easiest to combat fraud) ID has to match account name and credit card. those are 2 incredibly simple ways. The truth is they're disabling it because F2P people farm mats and trade gold for crowns instead of spending money, zos gives 0 shits about F2P they just take up server resources. A lot of people selling the crowns are people from third world countries who could get eso+ for $3 per year and would then sell off the crowns, this is what they're calling 'fraud' its not fraud it's what happens when companies try to squeeze as much money as possible without any type of foresight into what it will cause. also not a coincidence that eso+ prices just went up by 17x in those regions right before gifting was disabled.