Real Money Trading (RMT)

Unfortunately, PoE 2’s entire ecosystem has become infested with RMT. Not only are there just large amounts of RMT going on, but I now get PoE 2 RMT ads on Youtube constantly. Poe2.ninja is currently serving RMT ads. Anyone on the poe2.ninja ladder is getting spammed with whispers from RMT sites advertising their product. Scamming, underpaying, and haggling has reached levels never before seen in PoE 1’s trade ecosystem. I suspect this is the case largely due to the economic incentive provided by RMT. Many unique items have massive numbers of listings from different Chinese names on the trade website, but when you whisper them in game it’s the same IGN each time and they never respond. With the scale at which this is occurring, it’s clearly one person or a syndicate of people price fixing items that they’re then reselling on their RMT sites. At one point mirrors cost over 2600 divines. This is not possible without massive amounts of RMT going on - it is not a consequence of there not being enough divine sinks as Ruetoo speculated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svX0-FwfOyg&t=757s

Mirrors have now gone back to 600 divines. This does not mean the problem is solved. The fact that prices that high were able to clear at some point shows the prevalence of RMT as that is not possible in a normally functioning market. As a result, price spikes like that will happen again. I’m not certain that new players even understand that you’re not supposed to RMT in this game, particularly the Chinese audience where RMT in video games is the cultural norm.

Trade is so bad that prominent community figures such as Raxxanterax, many people here on the forums, and many console/Diablo players on the PoE 2 Reddit have been suggesting an instant buy-out auction house for listed items. This would obviously make RMT worse and would cause the entire game to death spiral. Because of the influx of new players from different audiences, GGG needs to repeat their public stance on RMT and on their item philosophy. This would make it clear that RMT is unacceptable to new players and would cultivate an audience that appreciates the game design decisions underpinning PoE, thus instilling confidence in the future of the game and increasing players’ willingness to come back for the next league.

If GGG doesn’t make a statement and the wider playerbase becomes aware of how bad RMT currently is, I’m not sure this game will survive to 1.0 launch. This is because even if RMT is fixed after the wider community becomes aware of it, the existence of it in the past undermines confidence in the economy in the future. If RMT stays around for too long, it will become a running criticism of the game for years even after it gets completely removed - like how PoE 1 was known as the laggy desync game for ages after it was fixed.

Actually getting RMT out of the economy will be challenging and time-consuming. I believe that it’s best to provide constant communication that you’re working on removing it to instill confidence in the future of the game.



The above paragraphs are one section of a larger document that I'm currently writing to give feedback on the design of PoE 2. I decided to send it ASAP in a half-finished state because I realised how urgent this issue is - the moment a big streamer makes a video talking about the scale of the RMT issue and it goes viral is the moment the game dies. I sent this message directly to GGG support yesterday in an email because I didn't want to publicly release this information due to the potential of mass hysteria. However, in the time between this message being sent to support and when support got back to me saying to post it here instead, Ruetoo and Fubgun have already started openly talking on stream about the scale of the RMT issue and those clips now have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube. Every hour counts.

If RMT was removed from PoE2 and everything resets back to 0 , half of your ''idol'' streamers would quit.

How do you think they are capped on everything few days into league? Most of them already have BIS BIS gear.

The economy in the game will never be ok until they put a real auction house in-game. Were are in the second week, and everyone is already asking divines for mid-good gear, locking you on any tier you are because loot drops are the floor, and buying something right now it´s too expensive.


But being honest, they will never do an action house, because at the moment, if you wanna sell something, you need to be in game, and after this season, it´s more than obvious their focus is on engagement at all costs and pump those charts of current online players.

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KimerusDark#7070 wrote:

The economy in the game will never be ok until they put a real auction house in-game.

They economy seems absolutely fine at the moment.

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Werdx_1#3669 wrote:

If RMT was removed from PoE2 and everything resets back to 0 , half of your ''idol'' streamers would quit.

How do you think they are capped on everything few days into league? Most of them already have BIS BIS gear.

I'm not sure where this conspiracy of streamers utilising RMT comes from. Theoretically, if the biggest streamers were using RMT on a mass scale, logically shouldn't there be definitive proof of at least one big streamer utilising RMT over the last 11 years of the game's existence? The fact that the rate of conviction (or even of half-decent evidence) is 0% should say something.

The only example I've been able to find of any reasonable suspicion of RMT is a small streamer named GoodIdeaGaming who was also known to scam in Diablo 3 and viewbot his twitch stream. He RMT'ed in multiple other games, he did coke on stream, and was indefinitely banned on twitch for 3 years. Name one of these risk factors that apply to the current biggest streamers.

These people have good gear a few days into the league because they have thousands of hours of experience and play for 12+ hours a day on leaguestart because they have real-life economic incentive to do so from the money made from streaming. And no, they do not have BIS BIS gear. A mirror in PoE 1 at leaguestart is normally like 400-500 divines and you can reasonably make 10-20 div/h, meaning it takes around 20-50 hours of labour to earn a mirror. A 4 stone run takes 10-20 hours. So 1 mirror every couple days starting day 3 is the rate that you'd expect. And that's around about the rate you see from the top sc trade streamers.

From actually watching a variety of streamers, one of the top complaints I've been hearing is that trade is unbearable. My analysis leads me to believe that RMT is the underlying cause of many of the issues underpinning trade. ds_lily has been non-stop complaining about poor trade etiquette, in particular begging and underpaying. In Ruetoo's last stream he mentioned RMT as a notable problem multiple times. In the same stream, Fubgun complained about how buyers of very expensive items openly talk about buying divines through RMT in his whispers without any response or retaliation from GGG.

P.S.
At no point did I use the word idol. Don't use quotation marks for emphasis.

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KimerusDark#7070 wrote:

The economy in the game will never be ok until they put a real auction house in-game. Were are in the second week, and everyone is already asking divines for mid-good gear, locking you on any tier you are because loot drops are the floor, and buying something right now it´s too expensive.


But being honest, they will never do an action house, because at the moment, if you wanna sell something, you need to be in game, and after this season, it´s more than obvious their focus is on engagement at all costs and pump those charts of current online players.

Chris Wilson has talked extensively about why you need to be in-game, message a real person who has the choice to respond to you or not, and then travel to their location to initiate a trade. Here is some recommended reading if you're interested.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3069670
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3300117

At no point does he ever mention player engagement from being in-game to trade because a much better method of increasing player numbers is by making a good game. He went with the second option.

Look at every ARPG that has integrated an in-game instant buyout auction house for listed items. None of them have loot that feels anywhere near as meaningful as the loot in PoE. I don't think that's a coincidence - maybe Chris was onto something.