Though most players are already aware of the crown gifting issues, for those who may be unaware, a lot of players were using their ESO Gold to buy crown store items, and since March, the ability to do so has gradually disappeared. Let’s look at the full timeline of events with the disabling of crown gifting.
March
This all started on March 3rd, when PC players started seeing the gift option was greyed out on specifically Crown Crates.
Originally, ZOS said it was a technical issue that they were investigating, but the investigation is complicated due to platform differences. It’s interesting to note that at this point, console crate gifting was still enabled.
At the end of March, ZOS assures us that crate gifting will not be eliminated. And for the time being, they would be adding a 3 minute timer when swapping megaservers, which was seemingly related.
April
And then another month went by, they claimed to have identified the issue, but we still saw no progress while they worked to identify and test their fix.
On April 27th, crate gifting was temporarily, and unintentionally, enabled, but it was short-lived.
May
And then on May 3rd, they again asked for patience while they tested the fix. They also mentioned that the timer between swapping servers would be lowered with the fix.
On May 10th, they confirm that a fix has been pushed, and results are being evaluated.
But, on May 22nd, they let us know the fix they implemented was working as intended.
However, they have identified another issue, and it will be a few more weeks.
At this point, they plan to create a temporary solution while they work on it.
June
On June 16th, ZOS was finally transparent with us, and they tell us they discovered some fraudulent behavior related to Crown Crate gifting, primarily on the PC platform, and that they were continuing to work on a long-term resolution for that issue, which meant PC Crown Crate gifting would remain unavailable.
At this point, it was nice to get an actual explanation. We went from a “bug” to “fraudulent behavior”, but the saga continues.
Through the end of June, they assure us that a temporary fix was coming.
July
But, on July 6th, Crown Crate gifting was removed from consoles.
From March until July, console platforms were still able to gift crates. They continue to assure us that a temporary solution would be coming on July 13th. And it did.
But, what a headache of an option it was. Put in a ticket and wait 48+ hours. I didn’t try it myself, but saw tons of complaint comments on the forums.
They also made sure to specify that you can only gift Crown Crates that are currently available in the Crown Store at the time of the request, and that it was intended for Crown Crates only.
By mid-July, users began getting replies to their tickets stating their request was against the terms of service, and the program was not intended for crown to gold exchanges.
September
However, this temporary fix was very temporary.
On September 1st, they killed all crown gifting. This ended the temporary solution as well. And when they ended it without warning, players had gifts stuck in limbo that they could no longer claim.
On September 18th, they dug into the fraudulent behavior a little more with us. Some bad actors were using fraudulently obtained crowns to sell crown items on websites for cash.
The Latest As Of Posting
And on September 22nd, Gina said that they were actively developing a solution for crown gifting, and that part of the initial testing would take place on the PTS.
And this is where we currently are. There is no crown gifting on any platform at this time.
Potential Issues Happening
So, let’s dig into what could be going on here as far as I can tell. There are a few issues at play.
Issue 1: Crowns are overly expensive. Why would someone buy crown items at full price from ZOS when they can buy them for much less on a third-party site, such as IGGM.com?
Issue 2: Different countries have different prices and they’re not created equal. So, the bad actors were buying in the lesser cost currency and selling the Crowns online to players in the US for less than the US Crown store. This could also cause issues if players in countries where loot boxes are banned are able to obtain them from other players.
Issue 3: Crown purchasers were using stolen credit cards or initiating chargebacks after they’ve completed their trades, using alternate accounts that weren’t tied to them.
Issue 4: The seller was then taking the gold from the crown sale and re-selling it for more money. I speculate that this could also be where some of the stolen credit cards came from.
Issue 5: There have been a bunch of free play events or free game offers. This is great for getting new players, but it also gives the bad actors a means to create new accounts for free.
Issue 6: In my perusing of the forums, I saw a post that crown gifters can have 500 gifts in their outbox at one time. It is worth mentioning that on Xbox, there is a purchase limit of 1,000$ per day, and I believe PlayStation allows even less. So, I really wonder if this is why it wasn’t flagged as an issue as early on consoles, as it would take many days of unopened gifts to hit the limit.
Impact To Players
So, how is this impacting players?
A lot of long-time players don’t have anything left to spend their gold on, so they were using it to buy crown store items instead. This can have a negative impact on active player base — why earn gold if you don’t have anything to buy with it?
A lot of players wanted to buy specific crates, or crate bundles with polymorphs and because of the rotation missed items that they wanted and ZOS hasn’t said if they will be purchasable when the issue is resolved.
A lot of long-time players just like to gift their friends in the game, whether for an anniversary, or a birthday. And a lot of guilds hold raffles or contests with crown store items as the prize. It also raises some red flags for the player base that we went from just crates being fraudulently purchased to now all crown store items.
Impact To ZOS
But this is also hurting ZOS!
I have no doubt that they want to turn gifting back on. Gifts are money, but they can’t chance losing money either. They are a business, and making money is the end goal for them!
I know a lot of players say “but if you’re buying with gold, you’re not spending money and they want you to spend money.” And that’s true.
But a legitimate crown seller is making them money because they are still buying the crowns. It becomes an issue for them when credit card companies are fighting for stolen funds, or when people are using third parties to spend their money instead of in the crown store.
Conclusion
The long timeline to the fix has been disheartening.
I know, but I don’t believe there is any happy party in this scenario, aside from those who were cheating the system. I really hope they have determined a solution soon.
It would have been better if ZOS was transparent from the beginning. They lost a lot of faith from their player base. But the longer this goes on, the bigger the impact to the game as a whole.
