Is it currently possible in any way, or will the option at some point be available to gift SC account to account? I've looked and looked locally, and for the life of me I can't find game cards around my area to do it that way, but I wouldn't mind purchasing SC via PayPal or credit card to gift another person, or if an outfitmate is buying something like a helmet, and comes up 50 SC short, to let them borrow the difference. Seems like more money for SOE, and could even be the first steps towards a trading economy a la TF2, so...?
SOE would be getting allot more money from me if they allowed gifting of sc to people ingame, then I could give it to friends or put bounties on certain enemies and reward my team with some sc
It's not as easy as you think. Sort of comes down to taxation issues, SC is treated as real currency not an item that you've brought. SOE does get taxed on that stuff I've heard. Same with Steam wallet and Star Citizen sending of store credits.
There are issues with money laundering laws, as far as I know. I saw a Valve statement, that this is the reason, why you can't gift money on Steam but only items.
Really? Didn't stop things like sending people Gold by mail in games like Warhammer, or the whole concept of a guild vault. I think possibly the simpler reason is that they don't have any system in place, and CBA to write one.
^ Yeah, I can think of a number of games just off the top of my head where you could mail each other bought-with-real-money currency. SOE, please? I mean, you already keep track of all transactions to-and-from SOE, would it really be infeasible to just allow account to account transfers, and track it in the same fashion?
And how about gifting items or boosts? It always bothered me, that I can not appreciate my fellow squad or platoon leaders with a nice gift =( I really like the idea of gifting and I know, a lot of people would like to spare some change on their friends. Just like you said, this is an unused opportunity.
Gifting is something we want to do, but requires a lot of time to get it to work on the backend. Don't want bugs with any of that stuff, plus we don't have an inventory system like other MMOs, which makes it more challenging to gift items. If/when we start working on it, we'll let y'all know.