So much Real Money Transaction

Observing so much RMT.

Trade and global constantly have gibberish accounts posting it, if you post in global or trade you get multiple whispers linking to websites.

You can't "remove" RMT, but doing so little about it's visibility is what helps to promote it.

People openly talking about it and doing it, the economy is going to crap due to it all and it will continue past Early Access and constantly undermine every league.

It's be so easy to include better language filtering, even account based scoring to identify accounts being used to promote it. You guys must be dealing with chargebacks and stolen payment methods etc. Surely between that and the integrity of the game you can make an effort to do something?

All I hear from people who played PoE1 is how complicit GGG was with RMT in it too.


I even have players outright messaging me to buy items with real money, rather then pay the divines etc I have it posted for. And checking the websites they have hundreds and thousands of exalts and divines in stock and available NOW!


Again, for the integrity of the game, do more, look into industry tools, there are plenty used by a variety of businesses to prevent fraud and abuse, use them and link them to account signup information to create scoring to identify accounts.

Prevent accounts from messaging until they are a certain level and add message throughput thresholds. No real player would be sending hundreds of whispers, no real player would be sending hundreds of the same copy and paste messages.

Yes they can/will just make a new account and level it and create more in preparation for the lvl 25/35 or whatever threshold, but this then creates time for you to action them BEFORE they inundate the global channels promoting their RMT website.

The industry moved beyond just filtering messages with www.website.com where they responded by replacing it with www,website,com - you can too. There are many game examples that have successfully curtailed RMT in their game, in ways that the community supported and was not disruptive to their experience. No it's not gone completely, but it's greatly reduced to where it has very limited gameplay or economy impact.

RMTing in a dungeon crawl game is akin to purchasing your own poison. Honestly, let them ruin it for themselves.

For as long as there is a way to transfer anything valuable from player A to player B - there will be always RMT. Period. This also applies to "services", like, killing bosses, boosting, etc - when players are paying not for specific items, but for a carry.


And if you think that those random bots spamming in-game chat is the root cause of the problem - you are then very wrong and delusional here. Even without in-game chat you just go to search engine and you type "buy something in game_name" and that's it - it is not a rocket science to become engaged with RMT.


Root cause of the problem is the game design purely built in a way, which incentivises and promotes RMT. Yes, the game itself is promoting and stimulating people to do RMT. When you have no drops, no crafting, and highly punishing environment, the player is left with two choices:
a) eat it and pretend to enjoy it;
b) start looking for "ways to make this experience easier".


Trying to fight bots and RMT-traders in an online game - this is quite literally trying to fight the windmills. If in some games you do not see the spam in chat - that does not mean the RMT is not happening. Super-large international corporations have tried to do that for decades and they fail every single time, because you cannot fight it due to sole nature of game being Online. Look at the competitor - Blizzard - for 20 years actively fighting with bots and RMT, taking bot developers to courts, sometimes doing banwaves - nothing ever helps and nothing is able to stop the problem.


This is just how it is and how it always will be. If you don't like RMT and bots - then you should stop playing online games, and switch to offline single-player games. But even in modern single-player games corporations are now trying to rip you off by selling you "season passes", "loot boxes", "skins", and other kind of crap.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult or impossible to reign in RMT. A RealID or similar verification process (One Person One Account), no direct player to player trading just through an NPC intermediary which obfuscates the item just enough to be not trackable back to an individual that is riding the developers IP to make $$. Not showing all masked items available to everyone when they find a trading NPC( you know.. by actually playing the game rather than being a hideout day trader). The fact you have to play to find an NPC (think Torchlight I&II merchants) adds the friction that GGG so desperately clings to. Bonus is the modification of the cost to further mask the real seller can be tuned as a currency sink.

Carries for Real Money are a separate discussion but also easily monitored and dealt with.

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LeFlesh#9979 wrote:

RMTing in a dungeon crawl game is akin to purchasing your own poison. Honestly, let them ruin it for themselves.

RMT seeps into normal trade by inflating prices. Prices are already out of control for the average and above average player.

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HaxorDoge#8588 wrote:

For as long as there is a way to transfer anything valuable from player A to player B - there will be always RMT. Period. This also applies to "services", like, killing bosses, boosting, etc - when players are paying not for specific items, but for a carry.


And if you think that those random bots spamming in-game chat is the root cause of the problem - you are then very wrong and delusional here. Even without in-game chat you just go to search engine and you type "buy something in game_name" and that's it - it is not a rocket science to become engaged with RMT.


Root cause of the problem is the game design purely built in a way, which incentivises and promotes RMT. Yes, the game itself is promoting and stimulating people to do RMT. When you have no drops, no crafting, and highly punishing environment, the player is left with two choices:
a) eat it and pretend to enjoy it;
b) start looking for "ways to make this experience easier".


Trying to fight bots and RMT-traders in an online game - this is quite literally trying to fight the windmills. If in some games you do not see the spam in chat - that does not mean the RMT is not happening. Super-large international corporations have tried to do that for decades and they fail every single time, because you cannot fight it due to sole nature of game being Online. Look at the competitor - Blizzard - for 20 years actively fighting with bots and RMT, taking bot developers to courts, sometimes doing banwaves - nothing ever helps and nothing is able to stop the problem.


This is just how it is and how it always will be. If you don't like RMT and bots - then you should stop playing online games, and switch to offline single-player games. But even in modern single-player games corporations are now trying to rip you off by selling you "season passes", "loot boxes", "skins", and other kind of crap.

Your ignorance is disappointing, but not unexpected. There are ways to reduce and combat RMT beyond the very limited implementations happening now. And visibility is a large part of what normalises and allows for RMT in games.

Most players response when playing a game isn't to immediately search for RMT unless they are exposed to it and told about it. Even where the systems are "broken" as you claim when it comes to crafting. Additionally, where there is no consequence / no visibility of it, players will RMT and take the chance, especially as we so poorly perceive the risk or odds of something.

I highly doubt they have implemented across POE 1 or 2 the likes of SIFT or other anti-fraud tools. They'd go a long way to helping to reduce and limit the creation of accounts used to spam players/chats as well as those being used to do the initial botting/farming and act as the middle-men traders. I speak and reference this from experience when it comes to similar tools use and their implementation. Tools like these help to address the scalability issues we had throughout the last decade, including those caused by the bad actors using bots etc.

And while false positives can happen, they mostly come down to an issue of resourcing/inexperience in identifying and weighing the factors or threshold for identifying accounts that need additional scrutiny or action.

That many bad actors use cloud services/VPNs if anything has made it easier to target them due to legitimate players not using such services and thus the identifiers that come with them. Many VPNs provide public information or it is available if you reach out through the correct channels to make it easier to identify and block their services when abused by bad actors. It doesn't take much to combat an outfit jumping between different VPN providers / locations and limiting any impact mitigating them has on legitimate clients.

Just because something is hard, or not absolute in it's effect does not make it not worth doing.

Is this your first online game with trade? They compromise accounts and then use them to spam. It's the nature of the beast.

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RKxZlcLUUF#5704 wrote:

Is this your first online game with trade? They compromise accounts and then use them to spam. It's the nature of the beast.

A game developer which doesn't factor in ATOs and include simple flags such as geolocations when it comes to login is absurd.

However, I can't say I've seen a single account spamming which wasn't a gibberish name, I imagine most if not all of those are being made with stolen payment methods, rather then accounts that have been compromised.

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Karishin#7986 wrote:

RMT seeps into normal trade by inflating prices. Prices are already out of control for the average and above average player.

The only winning move is to not play. Earnestly engaging in the economy in this genre is doing it wrong. You play with the loot you/your friends find for each other. I don't condone RMTing. I think it's a self-defeating practice that robs your of your own enjoyment.

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fancy_crab#3104 wrote:

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RKxZlcLUUF#5704 wrote:

Is this your first online game with trade? They compromise accounts and then use them to spam. It's the nature of the beast.

A game developer which doesn't factor in ATOs and include simple flags such as geolocations when it comes to login is absurd.

However, I can't say I've seen a single account spamming which wasn't a gibberish name, I imagine most if not all of those are being made with stolen payment methods, rather then accounts that have been compromised.

I understand you want to be right, but let me help you out here so you can be right next time. Automated flags have issues and cause issues. Always have. Some are good, some are not. Problems always come from them though.
Second, compromised accounts doesn't just mean a compromised game account, it can be a bank account, etc.
Third, gibberish names are on the characters, not necessarily the account.

You're welcome.