The RMT bot situation has gotten completely out of hand and must be addressed.

Title says it all. The bot spam in global is the worst it has ever been and for the past two days, they've gone from spamming global to directly whispering me. I was getting whispers every ten minutes tonight from bots linking to their RMT sites. You can't even use an ignore list because every bot whispers you with a new name of random characters. RMT has always snuck its way into PoE1, but this is on a whole new scale and the problem demands some creative solutions.

I know knocking out these bots is like playing a neverending game of whack-a-mole, but maybe more restrictive chat filters or something need to be put in place. Bring down the ban hammer on IP addresses from the country they're coming from, or require some further verification for creating accounts.

they're probably half of the ''playerbase'' at this point . so I don't think GGG cares as long as they buy EA and premium stashes for trade fishing

Every time I see an RMT in chat, I ignore them, then report then for every violation in the list. If GGG is fine with RMT spamming me, then they should be OK with me spamming them with a dozen reports per character. :)

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_rt_#4636 wrote:

You're assuming GGG even wants to address RMT bots...

It's EXTREMELY easy to deal with them: shadow-mute any character that keeps sending the same message over and over again in chat or in whispers, regardless of time between messages. They won't even know they got muted, so they'll never know when to create new characters.

And you can even add more aggressive heuristics when there's a link in the message and insta-mute based on the link, since all these bots are referencing the exact same website every time. This way no one would even see their very first message.

Also it's not rocket science to insta-mute all characters from flagged accounts.

The fact GGG still hasn't implemented this since PoE 1 but has taken the time to implement a profanity filter sends a clear message on whether or not they want to stop RMT bots or not. They're probably just manually banning these accounts and farming EA keys as much as they can

I would like to think the problem hasn't grown simply due to malicious negligence like this. I've never seen it at this magnitutde in PoE1, so maybe they figured it was not a big enough fish to fry. But at this point where it's gotten so rampant and out of hand, something needs to be done moving forward with PoE2.

I don't play trade leagues, nor follow the trade drama... But this EA is the first time I've seen (non-english) content creators on Youtube to directly promote RMT sites in their videos. lol

PoE design was always fertile ground for this. 100% unfettered trading being the most important mechanic in the game (untouchable sanctity :)) + huge RNG variance. This creates a million bots and customers for said bots. Everyone wants to skip as much RNG and grind as possible. So, whatever. I don't even get it why is RMT prohibited, on paper.

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SpoofyOof#1590 wrote:

I would like to think the problem hasn't grown simply due to malicious negligence like this. I've never seen it at this magnitutde in PoE1, so maybe they figured it was not a big enough fish to fry. But at this point where it's gotten so rampant and out of hand, something needs to be done moving forward with PoE2.

GGG is not the only company to neglect botting.

Botting is beneficial for game devs: they inflate player counts and they help move their game's economy.

Also, in case of RMT, it's a big invitation for lazy people with money to come into the game.
You think RMT buyers are your average casual player? Nah. They're the lazy people with money. They're the ones who want to get a busted character online as fast as possible and who'll buy cosmetics to make them look good while they blast everything on screen.
GGG indirectly profits off of the RMT industry.

About PoE 1's bots: RMT goes where there's money to be made. You had never seen that many bots in PoE because it was never a big game in the industry and most of its recurrent playerbase (15-30k players) were the people who were there to grind.
Bots probably came back at league starts and left when most casuals left too (1-2 months into the league).

PoE 2 got some hype and a decent amount of new players at the beginning, that's why the game also got a big influx of bots.

This game will probably have a decent amount of bots for the next 6 months or so, while GGG releases new content. Once this game gets its official launch, another wave of players and bots will come. Once GGG rolls out PoE's usual league cycle, things will look more like PoE 1 again.

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_rt_#4636 wrote:

You're assuming GGG even wants to address RMT bots...

It's EXTREMELY easy to deal with them: shadow-mute any character that keeps sending the same message over and over again in chat or in whispers, regardless of time between messages. They won't even know they got muted, so they'll never know when to create new characters.

And you can even add more aggressive heuristics when there's a link in the message and insta-mute based on the link, since all these bots are referencing the exact same website every time. This way no one would even see their very first message.

Also it's not rocket science to insta-mute all characters from flagged accounts.

The fact GGG still hasn't implemented this since PoE 1 but has taken the time to implement a profanity filter sends a clear message on whether or not they want to stop RMT bots or not. They're probably just manually banning these accounts and farming EA keys as much as they can

Unfortunately you have no idea how the bot farms actually operate if you think this is going to work

Brother y u complain? You know ggg is busy? They said all their customer support is responsible for forums, emails, ingame chat, cleaning, cooking and doing laundry in the office.
What do you expect?
They will ban bots in 15-20 business days(who were reported), be realistic

Has there ever been tencent game that banned rmt and bots? They buy stashes and so on, they're not going to be ever banned if they make money for the company.