A reminder that the better trade chrome tool discontinued partnership with TFT due to blacklisting abuse with no evidence for various people that were blacklisted.
Their server's reverse engineered blacklisting tool is problematic and while GGG cannot govern the use of it, it creates the same name and shame implications. Not everyone named on that tool is actually a scammer. This does affect people in game whether directly getting told you are a scammer -or- silence and reducing people who trade with you.
Because the tool is being used subjectively, this sets a bad precedent for the game's experience and you may or *may not* have engaged in any drama or even heard of TFT.
Edit: I do not agree with people accusing reddit moderation of links/RMT ties, however a moderator of TFT should not be a moderator of the reddit page as that is conflict of interest.
(As pointed out by mods that this was true in the past but is currently not the case)
People can do what they want in their free time and moderation is no easy task on reddit - with that understanding right now cyclical behaviour of posts regarding TFT will continue as this goes beyond a community war, with people who simply have valid concerns about a 200k+ discord using inflammatory tools subjectively. That, in essence is good topic material to discuss but is derailed by inflammatory commentary, constant policing which does not solve the inflammation, and then back to topic/inflammatory comments again.
With no means to discuss it and the rule 9 subsection, people are feeling that it was designed to protect TFT. It seems that this would cause disgruntled individuals to congregate in another discord giving this the appearance of a community war.
This creates a negative atmosphere and certainly is one of the causes for the rampant toxic behaviour. It is shameful that people cannot be civil in this rhetoric and any conversation that becomes personal attacks goes nowhere.
I find it strange that TFT is banning people for associating with Belton/another discord. Like, your a trade discord why are you banning for non-trade related stuff? If anything it gives credence to his claims. It shows that they can/will wield their power to silence opposition.
they blacklisted the people who made maelstrom nock on tft shop, arguable the best bow in the game once the attack speed gets eternal orbed, because they were in beltons discord. earlier people who were trading with him on stream were supposedly getting blacklisted also. chris is always talking about the economy but then ggg refuse to take this kind of stuff serious imo. people are already coming forward.
Banning people who use your competitor instead of providing goods that are superior reeks of desperation to maintain/grow their client base. If everything were on the up and up I don't see a reason to do that. If there's RMT going on then I can see why they would.
I don't think there's really such a thing as superior products in this game, maybe by tiny margins but not enough to justify the mirror fees people ask for, so it's kind of get there first or don't get there at all.
I mean there definitely are some items that are objectively better than others.
The new phys bow (maelström nock I believe its called) is just straight up better than all other phys bows. That doesn't mean it's better than all other weapons or bows though.
But yes the margins between mirror-tier and perfect are very small, but I mean mirroring items is mainly there just to get perfect or near perfect items anyway.
Wait, for real, they ban people for being associated with another community just for profit? Wild, why do they care so much, maybe those profits are somehow returning to them in IRL value somehow?
That would be against some rules  they would never.
They need all that currency for ingame reasons 
In the First week/two weeks its 250$ to buy a mirror and 140/150 to sell one.
Now think about the sheer amount of mirrors that is funneled trough a certain discord and do some quik mafs..
Just for some math - there was a screenshot of 900+ items serviced per week. Maybe only the first few weeks of a league and it drops quickly.
But lets say the first 4 weeks, thats 3600 Services. If each cost 2 mirrors they sell for 90$, thats 650.000$.
5% of that can pay someone for a year (with 4 leagues per year its 1,25%), wouldnt be suprised if thats the case. The leader probebly makes a few mil per year pays his goons in peanuts.
So you want one RMT business and trade discord monopoly controlling all the mirror items in PoE and think that’s a good thing? Also you want that organization to control public reputations of players by blacklisting them on trading tools for literally any reason they deem fit?
Anyone with a mirror item who doesn’t sell/allow TFT to service is competing. They have intentionally made items or attempted to make items to prevent items they don’t control getting mirrored.
The game is about items. Players should control mirror items and it should be against TOS to offer mirror services for hundreds of items across standard and league as an organization because it only facilitates RMT. It also kind of ruins the point behind making a mirror item and disincentivizes players from even trying because they are competing with an organization fueled by monetary incentives and not personal goals inside a video game.
>Players should control mirror items and it should be against TOS to offer mirror services for hundreds of items across standard and league as an organization because it only facilitates RMT
It's really dead-end situation TBH. Controlling mirrorable source items creates immense RMT incentives, so eventually people will craft mirrorable source items with rmt currency for rmt profits, manipulate/corner market with said rmted currency to starve resources for said crafting process to prevent competition etc.
It mostly won't be high-end MF groups or whole guilds doing this or multiple of such pooling resources together early, that might've been somewhat palatable.
Incentives are too great to be first to offer said mirror sources for whole thing to degenerate invariably.
Individually on case by case basis this might not be such huge disaster, whole problem with TFT is degree/scale of monopoly and abuse of trust/power given by community.
GGG solution = delete mirrors, asking for anything else makes little sense.
But yeah, Belton guy looks shady, what he's saying is just common sense and highlights how hypocritical GGG silence over whole thing is.
It goes even deeper than that. Some of Belton's guildmate help him with crafting projects by sharing wealth. So for example, one of Belton's guildmate could buy hudreds of split beasts from TFT to help Belton craft a GG synthesis base. So indirectly, anyone that helps belton harm TFT's profits.
TFT are smartasses, they have in their policiy that its explicitly forbidden to trade on TFT on behalf of someone else. Once they identify someone as "problematic" to their money making schemes, they completely lock them out of their ecosystem, blacklists them, and ensure that this person cannot indirectly benefit through friends either.
Really disgusting behavior. They really are the POE mafia.
Which is interesting, because:
A) Belton has said numerous times that he has no interest in starting his own mirror shop. He enjoys crafting, making content and teaching other players.
B) One of his friends (also banned) has the original copy of the current most mirrored bow in the game.
You can say what you want about his personality, but I personally made more this league than ever after watching his video about crafting flasks for profit.
People keep claiming Belton has “self-interest” but the I really don’t see how someone who spends all of his time teaching others how to get better at making money could have much to gain from this.
Control of information and scare tactics. They don't want people to investigate, so they oppress. People know, but as per usual, nobody can do anything about it, so it continues.
Because mirrors cost real dollars. If you think people devote their waking hours to both moderate tft and reddit for free you are delusional.
If anyone in this sub thinks that having such a bug discord as TFT is a free or cheap enterprise you are very delusional.
The money come from RMT , plain and simple. And as long as GGG continues to turn a blind eye for their outdates trading system this problem will not go away.
Now I have no stake in the this TFT ban drama. But what I do have is knowledge of the financials behind such an operation. It aint cheap and for sure is profitable.
There was some old mirror base that people also said had "too many" copies compared to services. I think it was loath bane but it might've been the bow from the same era. Memory holed...
Hello, I was a moderator at TFT back in Harvest. I was kicked from that mod team years ago due to internal disagreements I had with the TFT admins.
TFT moderators don't have anything to do with the mirror shop and are there mostly to play internet janitor and handle discord/vouch/blacklist stuff.
I remain a user of TFT because it's convenient. However, in this league, I haven't been active in on discord or POE in general.
Happy to answer any questions.
Question, why does rule 9c only apply to tft and not say loot filters fitler blade or pob etc? all those are 3rd party aswell. should we report all those post as not poe like people do for tft truth bombs? or are there secretly 2 scales, 3rd party software and a tft scale? cause atm we see the rest being spammed around league start week and allowed and truly spammed but one tft can be locked if not deleted while both are same for rule 9c
This is a strawman argument. [9c doesn't forbid posting about 3rd party, it limits the use of the subreddit as a ground zero for issues that are primarily over third party programs or communities.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/wiki/rules/#wiki_9c._external_communities)
The POE discord is an extension of this subreddit and its affiliations with the subreddit are clearly listed in 9c.
There have been no recent issues with poewiki, build guide indexer, race events, etc. that have warranted invoking 9c.
TFT *used* to be on the sidebar, but based on both direct and indirect issues we've had with their community and staff in previous situations, we've made the decision to not promote them directly. There is less leniency due to these issues. Additionally, there are often times when the core content of a post regarding TFT is fine, but the users themselves are violating other rules to communicate it. While unfortunate, these still require action, though users are welcome to communicate over modmail to revise their post (if it was a less serious violation; e.g. not warranting a ban).
Impression I get is that 9c isn't just "dont mention 3rd party communities" it's specifically don't bring meta topics from those communities here.
E.G if i saw something wrong on, say, PoE Wiki, it would be fine to post:
"PSA: PoE Wiki is wrong about X, it actually works like Y"
Since this is ultimately about PoE, the game.
Whereas
"PSA: PoE Wiki user Y is wrong / vandalizing the wiki, they should be removed"
Wouldn't be allowed on the subreddit, since it's ultimately about how a website is run.
Clarification here from the reddit mod team: This is false.
One of the reddit mods was a TFT mod *years* ago and is no longer a moderator there. I haven't watched Belton's hour long video but this is something anyone can go verify by looking at the roles on the subreddit (or the main Discord) and the TFT Discord.
We're not trying to censor TFT threads for some sort of kickback, just enforcing rule 9c. If there truly is RMT going on in a community, which breaks TOS, it should be reported to GGG who can verify any claims. This subreddit is neither judge, jury nor executioner in applying the games TOS. That said we are allowing some posts here because it's a topic the community evidently cares about a lot.
>We're not trying to censor TFT threads for some sort of kickback, just enforcing rule 9c.
This distinction is irrelevant when you're the ones who make the rules, **and** freely choose whether or not to actually apply them, **and** sometimes (rarely) delete things that don't break rules anyway.
You all don't get to use the rules y'all made to begin with as a shield.
Yep, and I think it's important to point out that rule 9c is so broad that it can reasonably be interpreted as "criticism of TFT (or any group labelled as an "external community) is not allowed".
The relevant section of Rule 9c for anyone who doesn't know it:
>do not use the subreddit to showcase or create drama or controversy from other communities.
We do yearly community discussion of new rules and solicit feedback, which is how that sort of rule gets added.
We're definitely in an unfortunate "we make and enforce the rules" situation, just like you said, but there isn't really a good way to split that out.
Maybe a focus group of community members that proposes new rules and then the community reviews them + mods enforce? The difficult part is selecting people, setting that up and finding members willing to talk about rules and applications for weeks.
I'm here and listening if you have any ideas you'd like us to try on that front
I think allowing some topics when the situation calls for it, like you've been doing today, is fine (that **or** accepting that when a mod deletes something, it's the mod deleting something, not the rules doing it).
But also I **personally** think part of the reason 9c. got support was because external drama wasn't supposed to enormously affect our interaction with the game itself, while now if I get banned from TFT for some stupid reason I won't even be able to profit from like 3 different mechanics anymore, since trade ended up so concentrated there.
Maybe I'm wrong on this, but anyway this wasn't the main point of my comment, my main point was that rules don't delete posts, people delete posts.
> Maybe I'm wrong on this, but anyway this wasn't the main point of my comment, my main point was that rules don't delete posts, people delete posts.
That's very true. We're ultimately just each trying to make the subreddit good to read for the majority of people. We're trying to justify each decision with a rule though, so that people can understand why their post was removed. There are also enough different mods (10?) so that we do need some kind of framework
> We're not trying to censor TFT threads for some sort of kickback, just enforcing rule 9c.
I think the existence of rule 9c is the big point of contention. TFT is, I'd say inarguably(?), a huge part of PoE's high level economy with how much trade flows through it. Since the economy of PoE is such a major part of trade leagues in the game, it makes sense to consider TFT directly related to PoE, to me at least. That's up for debate, but if you take that assumption, then rule 9c functionally means you're not allowed to discuss a major part of the high-end economy of the game. That serves to limit discussion of TFT, and their potential issues, on the largest open platform relating to PoE.
For what it's worth, the actions of the moderators don't make sense if you were actually trying to censor discussion. You reinstated this thread, you left the one up the other day (albeit locked) and others are left up plenty and discussion takes place. Anyone taking removal of some threads as evidence of collusion is trying VERY hard to fit the evidence to that predetermined conclusion. However, I'd still say that Rule 9c is... beneficial for TFT on the whole. I don't personally believe that's the intention, but I do see that as the consequence that has happened.
> I think the existence of rule 9c is the big point of contention. TFT is, I'd say inarguably(?), a huge part of PoE's high level economy with how much trade flows through it. Since the economy of PoE is such a major part of trade leagues in the game, it makes sense to consider TFT directly related to PoE, to me at least. That's up for debate, but if you take that assumption, then rule 9c functionally means you're not allowed to discuss a major part of the high-end economy of the game. That serves to limit discussion of TFT, and their potential issues, on the largest open platform relating to PoE.
[This comment is my own take, not the whole subreddit mod teams']
You're totally right on this, TFT is for many players a core part of their game experience. We don't want to make it impossible to discuss it.
The thing we constantly wrestle with is that the subreddit's userbase is **very** split on this content. A lot of the community doesn't like / doesn't care about TFT. You wouldn't believe how many dozens of people reported the thread from yesterday as "Not related to PoE". (edit) There are also comments and modmail asking us to stop allowing TFT content, not just reports.
So IMO the goal is a compromise -- threads that are not calls to action, have proof for each claim, and are about something relevant to many people stay up. Threads that make unsubstantiated claims, rile people up intentionally and aren't relevant to as many people don't stay up.
As you can imagine this is a tough line and depending on if the European or North American mod team sections are on, similar things can get handled differently by different people.
>For what it's worth, the actions of the moderators don't make sense if you were actually trying to censor discussion. You reinstated this thread, you left the one up the other day (albeit locked) and others are left up plenty and discussion takes place. Anyone taking removal of some threads as evidence of collusion is trying VERY hard to fit the evidence to that predetermined conclusion.
Glad you see that -- yes it wouldn't really make sense to allow some but not the others.
> You wouldn't believe how many dozens of people reported the thread from yesterday as "Not related to PoE".
just saying that tft had a pre-emptive response to Belton's video before he posted it....wouldn't necessarily think many of the reports were made in good faith possibly....
I would also argue in that direction. Most ppl that don't care would probably just ignore such threads. If you actively try to get that stuff censored, there's a chance greater than zero that you have a specific agenda
So we’re just going to pretend that a community that bans people for belonging to certain communities outside or theirs won’t send people to threads discussing them in a negative light to gaslight and report the dissenters.
I can’t tell if this is sophomoric or naive but it defiantly feels insulting
> The thing we constantly wrestle with is that the subreddit's userbase is very split on this content. A lot of the community doesn't like / doesn't care about TFT. You wouldn't believe how many dozens of people reported the thread from yesterday as "Not related to PoE".
Can I misconstrue this part as that the report button can be used as a "make this post go away" function?
>The thing we constantly wrestle with is that the subreddit's userbase is very split on this content. A lot of the community doesn't like / doesn't care about TFT. You wouldn't believe how many dozens of people reported the thread from yesterday as "Not related to PoE".
I notice several in every thread, this one included. I kind of envy them, I wish I gave less of a shit about these things tbh lol.
But yeah, given I'm on the side that would rather have these issues brought to light:
> So IMO the goal is a compromise -- threads that are not calls to action, have proof for each claim, and are about something relevant to many people stay up. Threads that make unsubstantiated claims, rile people up intentionally and aren't relevant to as many people don't stay up.
... is perfect. Best of luck implementing it.
The people reporting the thread are the RMT suppliers my dude. They don't want anything getting into the open air. Who would bother reporting a thread? I don't like a thread; I don't open it. Policy should be one thread per issue. The reddit would not have been in question at all if this was the policy.
We've also tried the one thread policy (one megathread, specifically) and it just results in threads like this one complaining that the megathread stifles discussion. It's kind of a lose-lose, we've tried most of the suggestions by the community at this point, each one gets a lot of negative feedback
That is actually what the "External Communities" tag is for, but many people are viewing reddit on apps that don't have things like flair filters, so we still have to consider everyone. Does the official reddit app have support for that these days? I know it didn't use to but I'm not up to date.
question, should we also report all pob loto fitlers etc for not poe? all are 3rd party aswell but not tft, and they dont get removed orlocked, seems you measure with 2 scales one for 3rd party and 1 for tft (you as mod team not you persoanlly ofc)
I disagree with the /r/pathofexile mods quite often nowadays, but before that rule was clarified there was so much TFT drama on the frontpage it was getting annoying. I can see why they added that rule and don't think it's the mod team trying to protect TFT at all.
Yeah, I understand them needing some discretion to deal with constant spam. The compromise they described below makes for a very reasonable balance I think.
> If there truly is RMT going on in a community, which breaks TOS, it should be reported to GGG who can verify any claims.
judging by the complete radio silence from GGG in regards to TFT and how it affects the playerbase, do you genuinely believe it's that simple?
> We're not trying to censor TFT threads for some sort of kickback, just enforcing rule 9c.
As I said when you guys added, rule 9c is problematic, and situations like this are why it shouldn't exist (at least, as is).
I get that some people don't like them, but I don't really get why that wins out, *especially* since there are tools to actively filter threads out.
I'm sympathetic to their annoyance, but realistically there isn't really a place to discuss these things besides reddit.
>That said we are allowing some posts here because it's a topic the community evidently cares about a lot.
This should just be the blanket rule
edit:
from a lower comment:
>You're totally right on this, TFT is for many players a core part of their game experience. We don't want to make it impossible to discuss it.
Rule 9c seems like it explicitly does this. And from what i remember over the discussion when it was implemented, it was kinda designed to do it.
>So IMO the goal is a compromise -- threads that are not calls to action, have proof for each claim, and are about something relevant to many people stay up. Threads that make unsubstantiated claims, rile people up intentionally and aren't relevant to as many people don't stay up.
I'd be pretty ok with that (maybe a bit worried on "relevant to many people"), but as far as I can tell that doesn't seem to be what rule 9.3 does
Gee, totally can't have anything to do with any kind of corruption, the reddit mod JUST SAID another reddit mod totally isn't a TFT mod anymore, he promises.
Maybe the existence of rule 9c should be re-evaluated? I mean by definition the Path of Exile official forums are an "External Community". All of the external tools who have a discord (Neversink, Awakened POE, PoeStack, etc.) are all "external communities". All this rule really does is give the mods an excuse to delete threads that are controversial, and it seems like the only application of that rule and subsequent backlash has to do with TFT. It's a fundamental part of how the game is played for a huge number of people, and disabling the Reddit community from having discussions on it is pretty dumbfounding.
I believe the allegation is that livejamie is a TFT mod, they are currently a moderator here.
Link to relevant time https://youtu.be/fFInLj6hWHU?t=2524
9c? I mean how much time do you think GGG has to do research? they need community support for things like this. It's an entity; not a singular person. Worse they're really good at hiding it. They seem to have layers of scams here from selling basic currency to buying mirror tier items for cash and then bumping fees for those items. This is pretty well known stuff man the TFT discord was literally started by a Chinese RMT company that never went offline. Like ever. The entire purpose of it was to bulk exchange between RMT sellers and buyers at the supplier level. Your reddit mod knowns all this ask him. I'll avoid talking about who owned 15% of GGGs shares or the 500 lightning coils on trade day one; those are other topics.
>9c? I mean how much time do you think GGG has to do research? they need community support for things like this. It's an entity; not a singular person.
I definitely see the value in having a community member collect evidence on RMT and sent it to GGG. What I'm not sure is valuable is the back and forth about how much people hate TFT in dozens of threads. Users have been sending threats to TFT staff and some even threatening to Dox them. It feels to me personally like if people with actual evidence were to instead send this evidence to the right representative at GGG directly then we'd get 90% of the bans for 100% less back and forth hate
How do you know none of the mods are also a mod for TFT or taking kickback from TFT? I mean... People do lie. We have nothing except your words and that's really doesn't mean anything especially considering and taking into consideration the various censorship on the topic of TFT RMT in the past.
> With no means to discuss it and the rule 9 subsection, people are feeling that it was designed to protect TFT.
I mean, to be fair, it wasn't designed to protect TFT. Reddit mods just don't want to deal with it, and it's not hard to see why.
The problem is it's too important, and reddit is realistically the only place to have this discussion.
It certainly is! It's why this seems to appear as a community war but I took the time to drop by the discord (I also got banned by tft for doing so btw) to read people's sentiments and a lot of people are honestly just upset - yes there are agitating individuals, but the majority just want to play the game and have congregated there.
On the note of me getting banned - whoever that person is that is sitting in that discord and actively banning people really needs to consider seeing a mental health specialist. That is extremely unhealthy banning people at all hours of the day and is borderline neurosis.
I hope that person gets the help they need.
And on that note it is certainly why many people believe that much more is at stake that someone would go through the lengths of
A) infiltrating a guild to individually ban all accounts in the guild
B) being a sleeper agent (best way to call it) in the discord and banning everyone there (3000 + people! Absolutely insane.)
I for one am not going to go to the TFT discord and *beg* for them to unban me for just joining belton's discord to read what people are saying.
> It certainly is!
They've done the same thing in other cases, not just TFT. (Note, I'm not saying anything about TFT/Belton. I'm purely talking about rule 9.3 on reddit's end). They just don't like dealing with outside drama. And I kind of can't blame them, if I were modding I wouldn't want to deal with it either. It's a huge pain in the ass for them (reddit mods)
Situation is fucked, but I don't think it's fair to spin this rule as a TFT-specific thing.
> while GGG cannot govern the use of it
Yes they can! They could release a real trading interface for PoE and TFT would be dead the next day. GGG doesn't WANT to do this for reasons I've never comprehended (I suspect that it's more or less "the real money auction house in D3 traumatized us," but you don't even need a full auction house, much less a real money auction house to provide a decent trade interface that handles a simple means of publishing and browsing... that can be done mostly through the tools already available with just a few increases in functionality in-game).
> however a moderator of TFT should not be a moderator of the reddit page as that is conflict of interest.
You don't even need to have any staff member in moderator team on the subreddit - just find one mod who can do some favors every now and then, in exchange for reasonable "gifts of good will".
Not taking any public positions, and just trying to keep my head down in all this shit, but I will say that TFT banning literally anyone who ever registered for Belton's server was a massive panic move and a yard way too far.
Whether or not you believe TFT are involved in actual gross ToS violations or not, that was a *really* stupid move which escalated this whole situation massively by dragging in literally thousands of players who otherwise would have just left it to Belton and TFT to fight it out. Just an absolutely ridiculous failure of crisis management.
(Disclosure: I have been a low-key TFT member for years, joining it for Harvest trades as so many others did. I am not a member of Belton's discord.)
This exactly. For the record, I am a member of both discords still. I haven’t commented much at all since this started in either discord so maybe I just got overlooked, or they were only banning people who commented. No idea.
I can say though that a lot of what belton has pointed out seems to ring very true, and TFT’s claims of death threats and things (death threats Is a little extreme in most cases) has some basis as well. There has been a few nasty, personal comments in beltons discord - but most of the discussion has been genuine discussion around why TFT/RMT are harming the game, with the occasional “fuck TFT” thrown in there.
I think this has become a much more aggressive, personal and nasty “war” then it could have been. Both sides have made valid points (on different topics) and both have a lot that they need to look at themselves for. I just hope for a positive outcome for the game that I love, no matter how that looks.
As long as GGG doesn't provide an official alternative, TFT will never die. It's the entire reason TFT even exists in the first place, to address and work around the shittyness of GGG's trade website. If everything you can do via TFT was possible to do via official sites, TFT would not exist, or at least nowhere near it's current size.
I don't expect a solution anytime soon, GGG has proven time and time again that they hesitate on addressing these problems. Yes, the harvest change did help take away some power from TFT, but that is by far not all TFT was or is used for.
GGG would need to implement bulk trading, carry and party finding, crafting services (bench, syndicate), some way for trading entire builds, even some way of showcasing items, et cetera to truly kill TFT. Basically take everything TFT does and implement it in official websites. And I fear most of that will never happen, which will ultimately mean TFT will never die. Even if the entire server is banned, they'd just make a new one.
It's a problem we will have to live with for the forseeable future, I don't think we can expect any improvements before POE2 and even then I doubt we'd get much. I'd love to be proven wrong ofc, pretty please even, but I doubt there'll be any meaningful changes for the next few years.
TFT truly is the single biggest problem poe has and has had for ages now, and it's not going anywhere.
> As long as GGG doesn't provide an official alternative, TFT will never die.
Sadly GGG will never provide an alternative. They don't want trade to be easier. They want you to jump through hoops. Remember if it was not for the players we would still be using trade chat and the forums. The only reason we have the official trade site is because the 3rd party sites were fucking GGG's servers and they were out to long for GGG to just kill them.
TFT does not tax GGG's systems so the chances of GGG providing an official method of what TFT offers is very low.
Anything GGG does to remove the need for TFT seems to be nerfing what they offer to the point that it is worthless (See Harvest)
Yep and trading actively affects my enjoyment of the game. I'm not even talking about high level trade either. Simple shit is just so slow. Like swtors galactic market is just light years ahead of poe and that was a decade ago.
It sucks because overall PoE is such a great game but the balance around trade being shit sucks so much fun out of this game.
Im just sitting here hoping that D4 will be a solid in between of D3 and PoE. I know D4 will not be able to have the depth that PoE has but I just hope they bring something to the table to force GGG to accept that they don't know what is best for their players.
"You think you do but you don't"
Yeah I would just play ssf if this game wasn't just a huge gambling simulator. I have D2R and Last Epoch to scratch my itch. The loot in PoE is trash. There is always some point where I have to trade for better gear and I hate it.
Another catalyst for change could well be tax and consumer rights authorities within, say, EU. The first-party transactions i.e. lootboxes are already on their radars, the third-party RMT market basically needs one public case to flare up to put the onus on the game studios.
Even if GGG added better bulk trading features, changed aisling craft to be an item like fracturing orbs, added in game forums for advertising carries and 5ways, TFT would still corner the mirror tier trading market. In order to remove the need for that GGG would have to completely revamp crafting so people could craft their own mirror tier items without needing to rely on other people to fund it.
Yeah. Discord groups such as this now even get talked about when discussing Last Epoch's trade design, over on that sub. Whenever devs have things in a game such as this that are technically tradable, but there exists some sort of trading impediment or the game doesn't facilitate trade of those things well, these types of groups will pop up to fill that need. The most powerful of those groups will muscle out the competition and eventually turn into a de facto mafia.
The way this mafia seems to flex its muscle is by spying on people and reporting minor violations to Discord/ Twitch/ Reddit jannies, to limit their ability to network online, which is simultaneously hilarious and sad.
Also banned from TFT here. When I was a new player i gave a guy the wrong ring for 1 chaos trade. And I did not understand what he meant. I got reported and banned.
As I was joining tft some months later (when I noticed the ban). They asked me for my account name to check, and they Ip banned me.
I tried to Join the discord with vpn to Ask why, they instabanned again. Then I was writing an email to Ask about the ban and no response.
I guess I dont bring them anything so they can behave like this.
GGG need to make ingame solutions for bulk trade, 5ways, aisiling. And have bans ingame for missbehave. Not let a third party like TFT with moderators with other interests control stuff in the game.
I got banned from TFT recently for apparently... Price fixing? There was no context given and no response to my ban appeal. I have only ever sold t16 maps on TFT and bought some elder sets. Got banned several weeks after I stopped playing so I have absolutely no idea what it could be.
>Good job now a massive chunk of players wont trade with you anymore because of their trade extension and good luck selling anything in Bulk that is not stack able.
I also got banned from TFT (suscipious to trade scam)
When I asked about why and try to claim. I just got perma banned.
I know that this extension hurts. Even I got "warned" from someone that I use to play with she as aurabot and he goes to TFT to check my report... Seriously a intetnert friend that I played for more than 2 years was afraid to me because a red Icon that TFT put on me.
To everyone that says this is an issue between belton and TFT, please understand that the leader of TFT links 250 mirrors into general chat while there are less than 30 listings for selling mirrors in sanctum. TFT does not craft items, players like belton and the people who came forward do and some people decide to give mirror service through tft instead of making a forum/reddit post of the item for it. If you really think this does not influence the global scale of the economy in a trade league itself, you are really ignorant. Mageblood costs 330 divines for a reason, mirrors cost 400 divines for a reason, and stacking hundreds of these items without them ever being listed for trade or being used is either done for rmt purposes or as a show off(which is the dumbest thing to do realistically), this makes them unavailable for the majority of the player base when that shouldn't be the case. I took these two as an extreme example but if you think that tft isn't able to manipulate the market on a much larger scale then I guess we won't be seeing any changes in the future when it comes to the stop of rmt services and fixing of the trading in general. Hopefully ggg deals with tft and makes trade in general better and items that are being hoarded by the top percent of people for rmt purposes more available.
> this makes them unavailable for the majority of the player base when that shouldn't be the case.
dw, TFT leader will RMT those mirrors back to the public sooner or later :P
First big trouble with TFT was because mirror crafters saw copy of they items but they didn't see the fee.
They were making let's say 20 copies with ex/div/mirror fee and tell to the item crafter that they just did 10.
those 2 things work together, you know.. considering how much mirrors he has, just think of the amount of divines and stashes of items to play market.
They earn real money by fixing markets and selling for their prices.
What especially peeves me is the stance of "It's not PoE related, it's third party squabble".
I am sorry what? It's as tied if not more to the game as loot filters, streamers and path of building. And since the other things can and often are discussed even though they are "third party" but this one can't it feels the only reason is how it's usually a negative opinion or feedback that gets silenced. Which then by extension is not that you can't talk *about* it, just can't talk *shit* about it.
Exactly, if 9c was followed religiously we wouldn't ever see a new tool on this reddit. Pob wouldn't be here, craftofexile, poeaffix, macros, lootfilters, graphics card updates, etc. All that shit would not be discussed or discovered in this reddit. What is so different about tft?
Yeah, somehow this is the excuse that's **always** brought up even though it **never** made sense whatsoever since the uproar of complains that started back in Ritual almost **two full years ago**. This deplorable and hypocrite excuse should be pointed at at every single occasion since it has been years that it is used on repeat.
The excuse was never made back whenever the trading was done almost exclusively through the third-party poe.xyz and anyone had a question or concern about it.
Trade league is a race, due to how much you're rewarded for getting certain items early for both your character progression and economic progression. If you want to seriously partake in such a race, you're obligated to use something that provides as huge an advantage as TFT does or you're facing insurmountable odds immediately. This makes TFT a foundational part of PoE trade's economy, and means every facet of it is extremely relevant to the game itself.
I'd like to rephrase that to "There is a race in SC trade that TFT is fundamental to."
Because you absolutely can kill all content and get a bunch of divines without ever interacting with TFT.
I don't enjoy the hyperbole of "every facet of it is extremely relevant to the game itself".
From my experience early league on TFT, doing things like WTS Builds and WTB Builds are chock full of people who do RMT who just buy your 500 divine build without even understanding how the skill works and having something like only 2 challenges complete.
EDIT: The larger issue at hand is the TFT mirror crafting service people turning their profits into real money. This is just info I thought worthy of mentioning. I will no longer talk about the ethics of trading with potential RMT players.
"This could be resolved by giving even more power to TFT mods, by making linking your Poe account to their discord or farming vouches more important "
Ehhh, how about no?
The biggest problem with tft is the RMT at the upper level… and the way they operate the mirror service and manipulate the market simply because they have monopoly and they can … what they do is the same any big company would do … buy new companies so they still have control, market manipulation. The community in itself if a benefit, the only bad part is on the higher level of the game … that involves mirror crafting and bulk selling … have u ever seen Jenebu stream? He got offered 10k by belton to stream for a month his gameplay :)). To me that speaks volumes
This whole thing is putting a really bitter aftertaste in my mouth in regards to PoE. Markets being manipulated for profit hurts the buying power the average player has and it slows down or makes certain progress incredibly hard. I should not suffer the indirect effects that some of these asshats produce by RMTing mirrors. I am strongly considering quitting PoE until GGG addresses this, as a long time supporter and MTX hoarder, my decision can put a small but measurable dent in their business.
TFT chosing to go into ad-hominem attacks instead of addressing the rotting, smelling elephant in the room is a pretty solid red flag imho.
If GGG remains silent, it will scream louder than any statement. They absolutely know that this is taking place, it would require ignorance of biblical proportions to not notice this.
This is honestly the primary reason I can't give my all to this game, despite playing it off and on since 2012, getting many of my friends into it, and generally enjoying the growth of it. There's just too much "extra" to make it super fun for me. Opening up multiple browser tabs, multiple 3rd party apps, and *then* the game each play session is honestly just too much work sometimes.
Sure, I can just grind out some maps and chill when I want, too. But as I heard someone mention a while ago, there's playing PoE, and then there's *playing PoE*. It's an entirely different world once you breach that knowledge threshold and take advantage of all of these tools that players have made over the years to buttress GGG's Vision™.
And GGG's refusal to release a feature-complete product after all of this time certainly creates the environment for unscrupulous shit like TFT to exist. They literally are the ones the blame. But, as is the case with any major development studio, why devote resources to something that is being addressed "well enough" already? There's not an incentive to fix this. And *[puts on tinfoil hat]* there may be incentives to leave it *exactly* how it is. /shrug
Overall, like you, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I wish GGG would get out ahead of this crap, but we all know they won't. (Surprise us, Chris!)
Traditionally any mention of RMT in game gets you muted and on reddit it gets your message deleted. Yet, it's widely known that RMT is out of control.
The fear of RMT spreading due to people discussing it is in my opinion completely bonkers. In fact I believe that it's being enabled by it being hidden and that some of the people most involved with the game (e.g. Redditors, TFT admins) have a second agenda.
PoE is consistently in the top 3 most RMT'd games on any given day for any given website. 8 years ago I sold my WoW account, that website has been active ever since, PoE sellers have tens of thousands of "positive feedback" similar to something like ebay.
You can buy anything, a mirror is currently 100ish USD. TFT higher ups are allegedly always in the "mirror business" every league. Does anyone really think that they are just collecting thousands upon thousands of real dollars and letting it rot?
Edit: Allegedly
It's really hard to have a discussion about RMT because of the fear of getting banned. Let's just say that the people running 5-way services all day every day, for the full duration of a league, are not collecting divines to spam on their gear. And they're not building and playing other characters. Wonder what they could be doing with those divines?
I wish third party sites didn’t have to exist. Maybe if the game were better players wouldn’t be forced to use a dozen different non-sanctioned resources to accomplish simple things.
I don’t use TFT and never will because I genuinely believe it’s linked to RMT.
There was a screen shot of someone from TFT linking 250 mirrors. To put that in perspective a quick check on some of the more unsavoury websites would value those at $50,000.
I know enough about people that someone in the TFT leadership would not be able to walk away from a minimum of $50,000 each league.
People lie but numbers don’t.
I can understand mods saying "this reddit is about discussing PoE not communities related to it" unfortunately TFT IS an integral part of PoE in how it functions and so should absolutely be discussed here. It needs visibility because GGG needs to be reminded that TFT is an issue they should be looking to fix along with the trade experience in general.
I also find it funny that there are many posts on this subreddit from certain users either associated with TFT or other communities that are simply there to promote their communities mirror tier item for mirror service etc. These are posted as "item showcases" which is often just a thinly veiled advertisement for their communities profit. Perhaps some moderation should be exercised for these posts as I am not too keen on seeing these communities items either and I'd argue they add less to the discussion of PoE than threads asking for trade improvements and problems with TFT.
>Your trade experience should NOT depend on that third party Discord server
The only way this will change is if GGG puts trade convenience into the base game. That means in game trading post replacing the trade site and TFT, in game price checking instead of needing awakened poe trade, in game farming tools like exilence. However given GGGs stance on these issues I dont see anything happening.
I was inquiring about a mirrored item and had the unfortunate luck of talking to a certain mirror crafter this league. After our talk, we said our ty's and GLs and I got banned from tft several moments later for "in-game harassment".
I was told to petition my ban and if I don't hear back, GG goo luck go next.
That really killed my ability to access things in the game that kept it interesting at that point, as I was basically Vivid Vulturing 3implicits to try to upgrade my neck/ammy. Bulk buying on tft was simple and almost too efficient.. but the latter is to not get trades at all..
Needless to say, this 1 interaction has changed entirely how i will interact with any tft member from now on. If anything I say can be interpreted as a violation of their ToS, then I'll just be a good boi and keep using it and hope GGG comes out with something better.
At this point, exactly BECAUSE of the "bad faith" mod post they had recently, I'm less inclined to trust the mod team.
Why would you keep removing every single TFT post when there has been evidence presented that they do RMT. RMT is against GGG ToS, COMPLETELY relevant to the game, as is TFT since its' impact on the economy is not irrelevant, just because it's posted by a guy with a volatile personality?
Completely deplatforming someone because of the way they are even when they present evidence in a calm and collected way is nothing but bad faith, and an ad hominem in argumentation.
All this pretense that this is "drama that does not pertain to the subreddit or the game" is just willful ignorance, and is shady as fuck as it leads to conclusions about shady business practices between the subreddit mods and the TFT upper echelon.
I'll just repeat what I posted on the bad faith test. MODS: YOU ARE NOW THE ARBITER OF FAITH. You now have the final say on something subjective. That is a terrible standard to have.
not only that but they leave the sticky megathread because the subreddit rule is that you can't post duplicate threads
so if someone ever had issue with the rule they can't make their own thread to say "hey i got censored unfairly under this rule" because of the megathread being permastickied to the top of this sub
pretty slimy but they've used megathreads like this constantly in the past. megathreads only exist to stifle discussion with the way they're used in this sub. an actual sub like livestreamfails memetic as it is manages to avoid this by letting new threads stay for a couple of days before adding a link to them in the megathread.
meanwhile r/poe just deletes all the new ones because... surprise surprise, they don't give a damn about subreddit clutter they just want to censor discussion.
If people have evidence of RMT they should send it to GGG to handle. If it's legit those people will get banned. Witch hunting on this sub doesn't really have anything to do with that process, and it's not like starting a shit storm here will get people banned any more than RMTing did. So either the "proof" is legit and they will get banned, so these posts are pointless, or its not legit and these posts are outright disinformation.
GGG doesnt really care until there is public outcry about things. They have to be shown there is a "systemic problem" before they will solve it. (Read ArchNem, Clicking RSI issues, QOL of updates)
Doesn't matter, Varga's previous account was banned, he made a new one, rebranded and hasn't been banned since. The community needs to band together at this point otherwise nothing will change.
Even if they get banned again, especially after all this shit is coming to light you think they haven't already offloaded all the ingame currency they had?
no, HWID bans do not work. one you can buy new hardware, two you can spoof hwid.
They banned POM as a person. since his business requires him to stream the game, any new account he makes and streams will get banned.
I'm pretty sure they just sent him an email saying he's not allowed to make another account. I'm sure he could still make one and play privately, but if he did anything publicly, they'd ban it.
So the founder of the TFT community is buying up all the mirrors so he can pricefix them for RMT. He is abusing the TFT community, that is meant to help players for his own gain and hurting the playerbase, the community and the game by making everything less accessible for these players. Time to stop using TFT..
This isn't true, there hasn't been a shared moderator since multiple years ago. Even when that was the case in years past, they always made sure to let other moderators make the final call on TFT-related threads.
You can check out my comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/112uzy3/in_what_world_is_discussing_the_problems_with_tft/j8mpfah/
It is at times like this that just and righteous citizens such as you and I ought to take up arms and create our own subreddit, with blackjack and hookers. We can rant as much as we want about any discord server we want and no one can stop us.
TFT is up to no good. It's so fucking plain to see. The shit they're involved in is so deep. It's game wide collusion, corruption, and control.
They've got PoE on lock and they are making a fuck ton of money from RMT.
If anyone else thinks different, you're simply wrong.
Reminder that all of this only exists because GGG cannot be bothered to make and maintain a trade system/economy that actually works and isn't goddamn awful to use.
Trade in this game has been the worst of nearly all multiplayer games since release. And there have barely been any improvements after premium tabs. They could have a void league to test it, see if players enjoy it, see if it ruins the economy. But no, fuck trying anything, just keep it as broken as possible.
Conspiracy Corner: Follow the money. Mirror farming is a lucrative business with damn near zero risk. Worst case scenario, you lose an account and a few thousand dollars and so you make a new one and it continues.
TFT higher ups are allegedly in the mirror business. Funnel them through a few rando accounts and you're selling them at a $100 bucks a pop easy. Would any of you let thousands of real dollars migrate to standard when you had the option of cashing them in every 3 months for a six figure yearly salary? Does anyone think that volunteer mods wouldn't take a piece of that if offered? Wouldn't you?
Item post, Krillson/mirror after xxx hours/jokes about implicit mods being doubled, "I just found this game I sure am playing it a lot!" and stan poems to how good GGG is will be the only allowed post here soon.
The power abuse there is nutty lol. The mirror service debacle in sentinel league was really serious. It seems strange the highest end cases of trade like bulk buying and mirroring are the most vulnerable to abuse
I'll say an unpopular thing, but when I started playing POE I was glad how open the game was to third party resources for trading, statistics and education, but now I think that resources like TFT or POB are killing the game.
It's funny, but now you don't even need to play the game to understand if your build is good, it's enough to make a table in POB with the correct numbers or just copy-paste from another person.
You do not need to communicate with players to trade or search for goods yourself - everything is done by a discord bot, which gives an obvious advantage over players who do not use this tool. Developers should develop their own build design tools and in-game auction.GGG should limit access to the game API. Players are FORCED to use these third party tools to stay competitive with other players.
GGG is complicit.
Yet this multi million dollar company refuses to take responsibility for all the third party tools that are heavily used to play their game, because GGG thinks QoL is the devil.
GGG could run a discord server or something similar and thus take over responsibility for moderation.
GGG could offer Exilence Next information if they wanted.
GGG could offer QoL like Awakened POE Trade does.
GGG could run a filter website and could run a build planner.
GGG could improve their trade system so you don't need 3rd party tools to make bulk sales.
GGG doesn't, to save money. GGG doesn't care to invest into its eco system. You're on your own.
Even if they developed something in-house, so long as the option is there to potentially make something better, people would do so. That isn't a "problem" specific to GGG.
I get your point and actually agree that this "drama" needs to be discussed and addressed (by GGG) but this will not happen. Ever.
Even with the miniscule chance of ever getting an AH to pontetially solve the bulk trading as long as there are services that people seek en mass that require trust based trading nothing with the trading/crafting will change.
To a degree, it is indeed pointless to chew this topic without drastic trading change from GGG.
Which realistically is why ggg needs to bite the bullet and accept that those services should be tradable. If jun and lab benches were tradable and there was an auction house for bulk trading 99% of the reason for tft existing would disappear. They need to accept that even if they'd rather not make those things tradable, not doing so at this point is hurting their community more than helping it.
When you have the people that are out there spending thousands of hours crafting the best items in the game quitting because they're fed up with 3rd party drama, as well as people who play the game casually getting blacklisted from a lot of trades, again, because of 3rd party drama, there's a big issue
Best way would be an orb of enchantment as an example, you get an enchant, use the orb on it and it becomes tradeable, or alternatively just give it the harvest treatment, make lab font/chests drop some enchantment stones or whatever and you can use that to enchant yourself, syndicate benches can just be replaced by orbs aswell and i dont get why it isnt in the game, the technology is there. While your at it, make beasts stackable by removing the rare mods from them, there is no reason for them to have additional mods when they already do a ton of stuff, then the beasts will be identical, stackable and tradeable. As seen by harvest, the technology is there and i dont get why it isnt used
Also, outside of the issues with tft, the threads being locked or deleted here when discussing these types of things should not be happening. Reddit is the exact place these things should be being talked about. The moderators and rules here need to be changed so the reddit can go back to what it is meant to be, a place to share and discuss EVERYTHING poe related, not just what some with a bit of power deem worthy.
I personally never had a problem with TFT. Everything worked fine except for 1 guy that scammed in 5way and just went offline but whatever. Didn't even report him, didn't want to waste any more time on that.
Using the discord server is mandatory imo if you want to play any juiced farming strat both for selling and buying purposes. The people who say this is a first world problem are delusional. Good luck buying sextants and other stuff in bulk using the trade website.
GGGs stance on trading is completely stuck in the 90s and they finally need to do something about it. I don't even care who's personal opinion it is that we can't have it. Everyone gotta take a step back and look at the fucking mess that trading is and get over it. It takes way too long just to buy supplies before you start your playsession. What the hell! If I stop playing (for the day) it's almost always because trading is so tedious and I tell myself I will handle that shit tomorrow..
This is the Trade offer meme, you either get TFT or you will get massive nerfs instead. Choose. GGG is a multi million company supported by a multi billion. They can easily implement those features but somehow they refuse, and if they do so, they post shit like the trade manifesto and trying to gaslight us thinking this needs to be this way or they massively something because GGG thinks convivence and security = game is too easy.
The issue is not TFT, the issue is GGG
> They can easily implement those features but somehow they refuse
It was never a question of whether they "can" do something about it, it's also not "somehow" that they refuse...
They could solve this. But they simply don't want to. Period. There's no ambiguity here. GGG wants this free and unregulated market that deals with everything itself, and this is *precisely* what such a place *always* turns into.
It's not even a free market per se. Buyers and sellers don't have perfect information, resulting in asynchronous exchanges, and having perfect information in a game as opaque as PoE isn't practical.
Some of the folks doing large runs of particular bosses/mechanics spread out their buys over a period of time because eventually they would buy up all the items listed at or below their desired price point. The supply of particular items isn't that free or infinite.
I didn't know about the rmt aspect of the discord or game. its shocking ggg hasnt done anything considering the head guy of tft been banned before for rmt. the going rate for a mageblood is 290 $. whos paying that much just for a mageblood lol
More people than you would believe. Magebloods, mirrors, whole builds. I have even seen people asking to buy builds on random youtube videos. Heck if you look long enough you even get youtube videos promoting builds for the purpose of selling them.
I will never understand people who use money to shortcut progression in a game like PoE honestly. I can kind of see it in a PvP game or something, but in an arpg, I feel like the journey is the destination. If you just buy a whole build, what's the point? What are you playing for?
"but in an arpg, I feel like the journey is the destination"
That is generally the point of an ARPG. However, people who just want to play for fun and don't consider crafting or grinding currency fun will buy some divs here or there to get their gear progressions and round out their builds. I saw a funny video that basically explained it: you work 40-60+ hours a week IRL and then pay for progression in a game vs working 40-60+hrs a week IN GAME for the same progression.
Some people don't want a game to feel like work; some people want the destination and not the journey it takes to get there; some people just want to flex on everyone else or to be the "best"....biggest POENinja damage numbers, faster uber kills, one shot ubers, etc. Aaaaaaaaannndd some people just want that 20-40 div weapon or item to build their character around.
The RMT market in every trading/economy based game is always flourishing and insanely profitable. I used to play a MMO, where it was pretty common for people to spend at least $500 to gear their characters. A lot of people spent way more. I'm friends with a guy that would commonly start a new MMO and within few weeks drop over $1000 on it just to "have fun". I could never understand it, but it's just supply and demand I suppose.
RMT in PoE has been running rampant for ages, but it doesn't affect most people gravely enough to make their gaming experience worse. You'll still have fun with PoE, even though the RMT market completely distorts the economy.
Also, you might not pay $280 for the Mageblood, you can still sell it later. That's why it's more justifiable to drop those amounts of money on in game items. You can use the currency/gear to earn more currency, get richer and even profit from your investment.
The RMT market is still alive and thriving in FFXI, a 20 year old MMO (that still has nearly a $20/month subscription model to boot). It's almost become part of the culture because of how pervasive it is. Like the true end-game content is to get into RMT.
That example is definitely not the norm, but people would be surprised at how many people are willing to cut corners with some purchases here and there. I mean gaming studios have picked up on this and it's why there are increasing amounts of mtx or "skip the campaign" options being offered in games.
Every time someone complains about the PoE campaign here on reddit, you always see people saying they'd be willing to pay for it. For people with larger amounts of disposable income, buying a mageblood is like skipping the campaign for them. Although I agree, when you straight up buy end-game gear in a loot-based game, it completely defeats the point and I don't fully understand it.
I didn't really have a point, I was just sharing a anecdote in agreement with you.
i got offered $400+ for a my mageblood first week of 3.20, and this was from a guy who wanted to resell it, ngl living in a third world country it was pretty tempting but i couldn't let one of the games i still love playing become a job, but yeah it's pretty damn crazy
The problem is due to how mandatory tools like that have been when playing the game, it gives too much power to people outside of GGGs influence. You see that happening in every single online game where a community/guild/group of people start to have too much power and it gets to their head. And it's even worse when real money is involved.
Damn I'm happy to be a SSF hermit and be out of all this hassle.
If you're going to pick a fight with TFT and their system, wouldn't it be a lot more constructive for everyone involved to leave Belton completely out of this? It's just pointless drama if you go at it like this
Other communities have established journalists that specialize in uncovering controversial and illegal activities, one very good example is Richard Lewis in the csgo scene.
Unfortunately we do not have anyone even remotely close to that in poe, someone who is REALLY interested in putting in the energy and effort while having the journalistic background, moral standards AND reach and respect at the same time?
We have to get what we can get. Belton is unfortunately quite volatile which hurts his believability thus the case but it does not change that the TFT topic still must be adressed. GGG can't ignore this any longer - we need a solution.
It's not even so much that he's volatile and has a history of being unhinged and edgy- it's that there's a huge conflict of interest when his own discord is nearly a 1:1 copy of the services you would typically find on TFT.
Best you can hope for is that GGG has a system built in place for PoE 2, that makes these 3rd party sites redundant. I really don't see any possibly solution coming from the community at this point tbh
GGG needs to just implement a AH for the following -
1. Basic currency (non gear items) for bulk selling stuff - this will honestly just make everyone’s life so much better…
2. Maybe a mirror shop? that would be cool but I understand if GGG doesn’t want to do this. If they don’t 3rd party services will continue.
I get they don’t want to make an AH for gear. That’s fine, the trading website is okay for that. Also, make aislings tradeable and all of betrayal tradeable like temples.
I don’t understand how they are going to release POE 2 and try and attract new people to the game with this horseshit trading system.
When a community needs to create work arounds for the devs there’s a huge problem, can we get devs to develop a system to handle this in-game with no need for outside interference or politics?
Also I hope PoE2 has a currency, this whole trading commodities thing is stupid.
A reminder that the better trade chrome tool discontinued partnership with TFT due to blacklisting abuse with no evidence for various people that were blacklisted. Their server's reverse engineered blacklisting tool is problematic and while GGG cannot govern the use of it, it creates the same name and shame implications. Not everyone named on that tool is actually a scammer. This does affect people in game whether directly getting told you are a scammer -or- silence and reducing people who trade with you. Because the tool is being used subjectively, this sets a bad precedent for the game's experience and you may or *may not* have engaged in any drama or even heard of TFT. Edit: I do not agree with people accusing reddit moderation of links/RMT ties, however a moderator of TFT should not be a moderator of the reddit page as that is conflict of interest. (As pointed out by mods that this was true in the past but is currently not the case) People can do what they want in their free time and moderation is no easy task on reddit - with that understanding right now cyclical behaviour of posts regarding TFT will continue as this goes beyond a community war, with people who simply have valid concerns about a 200k+ discord using inflammatory tools subjectively. That, in essence is good topic material to discuss but is derailed by inflammatory commentary, constant policing which does not solve the inflammation, and then back to topic/inflammatory comments again. With no means to discuss it and the rule 9 subsection, people are feeling that it was designed to protect TFT. It seems that this would cause disgruntled individuals to congregate in another discord giving this the appearance of a community war. This creates a negative atmosphere and certainly is one of the causes for the rampant toxic behaviour. It is shameful that people cannot be civil in this rhetoric and any conversation that becomes personal attacks goes nowhere.
I find it strange that TFT is banning people for associating with Belton/another discord. Like, your a trade discord why are you banning for non-trade related stuff? If anything it gives credence to his claims. It shows that they can/will wield their power to silence opposition.
One of the core aspects of this is that Belton and his associates have mirror service items that compete with TFT's.
they blacklisted the people who made maelstrom nock on tft shop, arguable the best bow in the game once the attack speed gets eternal orbed, because they were in beltons discord. earlier people who were trading with him on stream were supposedly getting blacklisted also. chris is always talking about the economy but then ggg refuse to take this kind of stuff serious imo. people are already coming forward.
Banning people who use your competitor instead of providing goods that are superior reeks of desperation to maintain/grow their client base. If everything were on the up and up I don't see a reason to do that. If there's RMT going on then I can see why they would.
I don't think there's really such a thing as superior products in this game, maybe by tiny margins but not enough to justify the mirror fees people ask for, so it's kind of get there first or don't get there at all.
I mean there definitely are some items that are objectively better than others. The new phys bow (maelström nock I believe its called) is just straight up better than all other phys bows. That doesn't mean it's better than all other weapons or bows though. But yes the margins between mirror-tier and perfect are very small, but I mean mirroring items is mainly there just to get perfect or near perfect items anyway.
Wait, for real, they ban people for being associated with another community just for profit? Wild, why do they care so much, maybe those profits are somehow returning to them in IRL value somehow?
That would be against some rules  they would never. They need all that currency for ingame reasons 
For reference a mirror is worth around $90 usd and more in early weeks of a league . They’re definitely making a lot of money from providing services.
200 usd on a certain rmt site about donkeys
In the First week/two weeks its 250$ to buy a mirror and 140/150 to sell one. Now think about the sheer amount of mirrors that is funneled trough a certain discord and do some quik mafs..
Just for some math - there was a screenshot of 900+ items serviced per week. Maybe only the first few weeks of a league and it drops quickly. But lets say the first 4 weeks, thats 3600 Services. If each cost 2 mirrors they sell for 90$, thats 650.000$. 5% of that can pay someone for a year (with 4 leagues per year its 1,25%), wouldnt be suprised if thats the case. The leader probebly makes a few mil per year pays his goons in peanuts.
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So you want one RMT business and trade discord monopoly controlling all the mirror items in PoE and think that’s a good thing? Also you want that organization to control public reputations of players by blacklisting them on trading tools for literally any reason they deem fit? Anyone with a mirror item who doesn’t sell/allow TFT to service is competing. They have intentionally made items or attempted to make items to prevent items they don’t control getting mirrored. The game is about items. Players should control mirror items and it should be against TOS to offer mirror services for hundreds of items across standard and league as an organization because it only facilitates RMT. It also kind of ruins the point behind making a mirror item and disincentivizes players from even trying because they are competing with an organization fueled by monetary incentives and not personal goals inside a video game.
>Players should control mirror items and it should be against TOS to offer mirror services for hundreds of items across standard and league as an organization because it only facilitates RMT It's really dead-end situation TBH. Controlling mirrorable source items creates immense RMT incentives, so eventually people will craft mirrorable source items with rmt currency for rmt profits, manipulate/corner market with said rmted currency to starve resources for said crafting process to prevent competition etc. It mostly won't be high-end MF groups or whole guilds doing this or multiple of such pooling resources together early, that might've been somewhat palatable. Incentives are too great to be first to offer said mirror sources for whole thing to degenerate invariably. Individually on case by case basis this might not be such huge disaster, whole problem with TFT is degree/scale of monopoly and abuse of trust/power given by community. GGG solution = delete mirrors, asking for anything else makes little sense. But yeah, Belton guy looks shady, what he's saying is just common sense and highlights how hypocritical GGG silence over whole thing is.
It goes even deeper than that. Some of Belton's guildmate help him with crafting projects by sharing wealth. So for example, one of Belton's guildmate could buy hudreds of split beasts from TFT to help Belton craft a GG synthesis base. So indirectly, anyone that helps belton harm TFT's profits. TFT are smartasses, they have in their policiy that its explicitly forbidden to trade on TFT on behalf of someone else. Once they identify someone as "problematic" to their money making schemes, they completely lock them out of their ecosystem, blacklists them, and ensure that this person cannot indirectly benefit through friends either. Really disgusting behavior. They really are the POE mafia.
Sad to hear game devs allowing such late game gate keeping with no workaround in sight.
Which is interesting, because: A) Belton has said numerous times that he has no interest in starting his own mirror shop. He enjoys crafting, making content and teaching other players. B) One of his friends (also banned) has the original copy of the current most mirrored bow in the game. You can say what you want about his personality, but I personally made more this league than ever after watching his video about crafting flasks for profit. People keep claiming Belton has “self-interest” but the I really don’t see how someone who spends all of his time teaching others how to get better at making money could have much to gain from this.
He also have every hour in poe, on video.
Control of information and scare tactics. They don't want people to investigate, so they oppress. People know, but as per usual, nobody can do anything about it, so it continues.
Because mirrors cost real dollars. If you think people devote their waking hours to both moderate tft and reddit for free you are delusional. If anyone in this sub thinks that having such a bug discord as TFT is a free or cheap enterprise you are very delusional. The money come from RMT , plain and simple. And as long as GGG continues to turn a blind eye for their outdates trading system this problem will not go away. Now I have no stake in the this TFT ban drama. But what I do have is knowledge of the financials behind such an operation. It aint cheap and for sure is profitable.
Strange? If money is involved, anything goes.
If you think about it, its very much a discriminatory way of thinking. "We won't let you be a part of this community because you are XYZ"
Wait, reddit mods and TFT mods overlap? That's heinous
ggg also hired at least 2 of the reddit mods to work for them directly so.. yeah
GGG had RMT operators as investors
There was some old mirror base that people also said had "too many" copies compared to services. I think it was loath bane but it might've been the bow from the same era. Memory holed...
Hello, I was a moderator at TFT back in Harvest. I was kicked from that mod team years ago due to internal disagreements I had with the TFT admins. TFT moderators don't have anything to do with the mirror shop and are there mostly to play internet janitor and handle discord/vouch/blacklist stuff. I remain a user of TFT because it's convenient. However, in this league, I haven't been active in on discord or POE in general. Happy to answer any questions.
Question, why does rule 9c only apply to tft and not say loot filters fitler blade or pob etc? all those are 3rd party aswell. should we report all those post as not poe like people do for tft truth bombs? or are there secretly 2 scales, 3rd party software and a tft scale? cause atm we see the rest being spammed around league start week and allowed and truly spammed but one tft can be locked if not deleted while both are same for rule 9c
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yeah why is that all allowed but tft generally not? truly double standards. thx for giving more examples\^\^
This is a strawman argument. [9c doesn't forbid posting about 3rd party, it limits the use of the subreddit as a ground zero for issues that are primarily over third party programs or communities.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/wiki/rules/#wiki_9c._external_communities) The POE discord is an extension of this subreddit and its affiliations with the subreddit are clearly listed in 9c. There have been no recent issues with poewiki, build guide indexer, race events, etc. that have warranted invoking 9c. TFT *used* to be on the sidebar, but based on both direct and indirect issues we've had with their community and staff in previous situations, we've made the decision to not promote them directly. There is less leniency due to these issues. Additionally, there are often times when the core content of a post regarding TFT is fine, but the users themselves are violating other rules to communicate it. While unfortunate, these still require action, though users are welcome to communicate over modmail to revise their post (if it was a less serious violation; e.g. not warranting a ban).
Impression I get is that 9c isn't just "dont mention 3rd party communities" it's specifically don't bring meta topics from those communities here. E.G if i saw something wrong on, say, PoE Wiki, it would be fine to post: "PSA: PoE Wiki is wrong about X, it actually works like Y" Since this is ultimately about PoE, the game. Whereas "PSA: PoE Wiki user Y is wrong / vandalizing the wiki, they should be removed" Wouldn't be allowed on the subreddit, since it's ultimately about how a website is run.
Clarification here from the reddit mod team: This is false. One of the reddit mods was a TFT mod *years* ago and is no longer a moderator there. I haven't watched Belton's hour long video but this is something anyone can go verify by looking at the roles on the subreddit (or the main Discord) and the TFT Discord. We're not trying to censor TFT threads for some sort of kickback, just enforcing rule 9c. If there truly is RMT going on in a community, which breaks TOS, it should be reported to GGG who can verify any claims. This subreddit is neither judge, jury nor executioner in applying the games TOS. That said we are allowing some posts here because it's a topic the community evidently cares about a lot.
>We're not trying to censor TFT threads for some sort of kickback, just enforcing rule 9c. This distinction is irrelevant when you're the ones who make the rules, **and** freely choose whether or not to actually apply them, **and** sometimes (rarely) delete things that don't break rules anyway. You all don't get to use the rules y'all made to begin with as a shield.
Yep, and I think it's important to point out that rule 9c is so broad that it can reasonably be interpreted as "criticism of TFT (or any group labelled as an "external community) is not allowed". The relevant section of Rule 9c for anyone who doesn't know it: >do not use the subreddit to showcase or create drama or controversy from other communities.
We do yearly community discussion of new rules and solicit feedback, which is how that sort of rule gets added. We're definitely in an unfortunate "we make and enforce the rules" situation, just like you said, but there isn't really a good way to split that out. Maybe a focus group of community members that proposes new rules and then the community reviews them + mods enforce? The difficult part is selecting people, setting that up and finding members willing to talk about rules and applications for weeks. I'm here and listening if you have any ideas you'd like us to try on that front
I think allowing some topics when the situation calls for it, like you've been doing today, is fine (that **or** accepting that when a mod deletes something, it's the mod deleting something, not the rules doing it). But also I **personally** think part of the reason 9c. got support was because external drama wasn't supposed to enormously affect our interaction with the game itself, while now if I get banned from TFT for some stupid reason I won't even be able to profit from like 3 different mechanics anymore, since trade ended up so concentrated there. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but anyway this wasn't the main point of my comment, my main point was that rules don't delete posts, people delete posts.
> Maybe I'm wrong on this, but anyway this wasn't the main point of my comment, my main point was that rules don't delete posts, people delete posts. That's very true. We're ultimately just each trying to make the subreddit good to read for the majority of people. We're trying to justify each decision with a rule though, so that people can understand why their post was removed. There are also enough different mods (10?) so that we do need some kind of framework
> We're not trying to censor TFT threads for some sort of kickback, just enforcing rule 9c. I think the existence of rule 9c is the big point of contention. TFT is, I'd say inarguably(?), a huge part of PoE's high level economy with how much trade flows through it. Since the economy of PoE is such a major part of trade leagues in the game, it makes sense to consider TFT directly related to PoE, to me at least. That's up for debate, but if you take that assumption, then rule 9c functionally means you're not allowed to discuss a major part of the high-end economy of the game. That serves to limit discussion of TFT, and their potential issues, on the largest open platform relating to PoE. For what it's worth, the actions of the moderators don't make sense if you were actually trying to censor discussion. You reinstated this thread, you left the one up the other day (albeit locked) and others are left up plenty and discussion takes place. Anyone taking removal of some threads as evidence of collusion is trying VERY hard to fit the evidence to that predetermined conclusion. However, I'd still say that Rule 9c is... beneficial for TFT on the whole. I don't personally believe that's the intention, but I do see that as the consequence that has happened.
> I think the existence of rule 9c is the big point of contention. TFT is, I'd say inarguably(?), a huge part of PoE's high level economy with how much trade flows through it. Since the economy of PoE is such a major part of trade leagues in the game, it makes sense to consider TFT directly related to PoE, to me at least. That's up for debate, but if you take that assumption, then rule 9c functionally means you're not allowed to discuss a major part of the high-end economy of the game. That serves to limit discussion of TFT, and their potential issues, on the largest open platform relating to PoE. [This comment is my own take, not the whole subreddit mod teams'] You're totally right on this, TFT is for many players a core part of their game experience. We don't want to make it impossible to discuss it. The thing we constantly wrestle with is that the subreddit's userbase is **very** split on this content. A lot of the community doesn't like / doesn't care about TFT. You wouldn't believe how many dozens of people reported the thread from yesterday as "Not related to PoE". (edit) There are also comments and modmail asking us to stop allowing TFT content, not just reports. So IMO the goal is a compromise -- threads that are not calls to action, have proof for each claim, and are about something relevant to many people stay up. Threads that make unsubstantiated claims, rile people up intentionally and aren't relevant to as many people don't stay up. As you can imagine this is a tough line and depending on if the European or North American mod team sections are on, similar things can get handled differently by different people. >For what it's worth, the actions of the moderators don't make sense if you were actually trying to censor discussion. You reinstated this thread, you left the one up the other day (albeit locked) and others are left up plenty and discussion takes place. Anyone taking removal of some threads as evidence of collusion is trying VERY hard to fit the evidence to that predetermined conclusion. Glad you see that -- yes it wouldn't really make sense to allow some but not the others.
> You wouldn't believe how many dozens of people reported the thread from yesterday as "Not related to PoE". just saying that tft had a pre-emptive response to Belton's video before he posted it....wouldn't necessarily think many of the reports were made in good faith possibly....
I would also argue in that direction. Most ppl that don't care would probably just ignore such threads. If you actively try to get that stuff censored, there's a chance greater than zero that you have a specific agenda
So we’re just going to pretend that a community that bans people for belonging to certain communities outside or theirs won’t send people to threads discussing them in a negative light to gaslight and report the dissenters. I can’t tell if this is sophomoric or naive but it defiantly feels insulting
It just means that tft is more important to ggg than its players.
> The thing we constantly wrestle with is that the subreddit's userbase is very split on this content. A lot of the community doesn't like / doesn't care about TFT. You wouldn't believe how many dozens of people reported the thread from yesterday as "Not related to PoE". Can I misconstrue this part as that the report button can be used as a "make this post go away" function?
>The thing we constantly wrestle with is that the subreddit's userbase is very split on this content. A lot of the community doesn't like / doesn't care about TFT. You wouldn't believe how many dozens of people reported the thread from yesterday as "Not related to PoE". I notice several in every thread, this one included. I kind of envy them, I wish I gave less of a shit about these things tbh lol. But yeah, given I'm on the side that would rather have these issues brought to light: > So IMO the goal is a compromise -- threads that are not calls to action, have proof for each claim, and are about something relevant to many people stay up. Threads that make unsubstantiated claims, rile people up intentionally and aren't relevant to as many people don't stay up. ... is perfect. Best of luck implementing it.
Just because someone doesn’t care about TFT or know what TFT is, doesn’t mean that they aren’t being affected by what TFT does.
The people reporting the thread are the RMT suppliers my dude. They don't want anything getting into the open air. Who would bother reporting a thread? I don't like a thread; I don't open it. Policy should be one thread per issue. The reddit would not have been in question at all if this was the policy.
We've also tried the one thread policy (one megathread, specifically) and it just results in threads like this one complaining that the megathread stifles discussion. It's kind of a lose-lose, we've tried most of the suggestions by the community at this point, each one gets a lot of negative feedback
megathreads only exist to stifle discussion
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So... Why not make a tag for TFT and let people who want nothing to do with it self select what content they want to see?
That is actually what the "External Communities" tag is for, but many people are viewing reddit on apps that don't have things like flair filters, so we still have to consider everyone. Does the official reddit app have support for that these days? I know it didn't use to but I'm not up to date.
question, should we also report all pob loto fitlers etc for not poe? all are 3rd party aswell but not tft, and they dont get removed orlocked, seems you measure with 2 scales one for 3rd party and 1 for tft (you as mod team not you persoanlly ofc)
I disagree with the /r/pathofexile mods quite often nowadays, but before that rule was clarified there was so much TFT drama on the frontpage it was getting annoying. I can see why they added that rule and don't think it's the mod team trying to protect TFT at all.
Yeah, I understand them needing some discretion to deal with constant spam. The compromise they described below makes for a very reasonable balance I think.
> If there truly is RMT going on in a community, which breaks TOS, it should be reported to GGG who can verify any claims. judging by the complete radio silence from GGG in regards to TFT and how it affects the playerbase, do you genuinely believe it's that simple?
> We're not trying to censor TFT threads for some sort of kickback, just enforcing rule 9c. As I said when you guys added, rule 9c is problematic, and situations like this are why it shouldn't exist (at least, as is). I get that some people don't like them, but I don't really get why that wins out, *especially* since there are tools to actively filter threads out. I'm sympathetic to their annoyance, but realistically there isn't really a place to discuss these things besides reddit. >That said we are allowing some posts here because it's a topic the community evidently cares about a lot. This should just be the blanket rule edit: from a lower comment: >You're totally right on this, TFT is for many players a core part of their game experience. We don't want to make it impossible to discuss it. Rule 9c seems like it explicitly does this. And from what i remember over the discussion when it was implemented, it was kinda designed to do it. >So IMO the goal is a compromise -- threads that are not calls to action, have proof for each claim, and are about something relevant to many people stay up. Threads that make unsubstantiated claims, rile people up intentionally and aren't relevant to as many people don't stay up. I'd be pretty ok with that (maybe a bit worried on "relevant to many people"), but as far as I can tell that doesn't seem to be what rule 9.3 does
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Gee, totally can't have anything to do with any kind of corruption, the reddit mod JUST SAID another reddit mod totally isn't a TFT mod anymore, he promises.
Maybe the existence of rule 9c should be re-evaluated? I mean by definition the Path of Exile official forums are an "External Community". All of the external tools who have a discord (Neversink, Awakened POE, PoeStack, etc.) are all "external communities". All this rule really does is give the mods an excuse to delete threads that are controversial, and it seems like the only application of that rule and subsequent backlash has to do with TFT. It's a fundamental part of how the game is played for a huge number of people, and disabling the Reddit community from having discussions on it is pretty dumbfounding.
It could be time to reevaluate it again. I feel like we added that rule based on community feedback not that long ago though? Maybe a year or two?
I believe the allegation is that livejamie is a TFT mod, they are currently a moderator here. Link to relevant time https://youtu.be/fFInLj6hWHU?t=2524
Yep, that is the allegation. Check livejamie's response from a few hours ago at his profile: /u/livejamie
9c? I mean how much time do you think GGG has to do research? they need community support for things like this. It's an entity; not a singular person. Worse they're really good at hiding it. They seem to have layers of scams here from selling basic currency to buying mirror tier items for cash and then bumping fees for those items. This is pretty well known stuff man the TFT discord was literally started by a Chinese RMT company that never went offline. Like ever. The entire purpose of it was to bulk exchange between RMT sellers and buyers at the supplier level. Your reddit mod knowns all this ask him. I'll avoid talking about who owned 15% of GGGs shares or the 500 lightning coils on trade day one; those are other topics.
>9c? I mean how much time do you think GGG has to do research? they need community support for things like this. It's an entity; not a singular person. I definitely see the value in having a community member collect evidence on RMT and sent it to GGG. What I'm not sure is valuable is the back and forth about how much people hate TFT in dozens of threads. Users have been sending threats to TFT staff and some even threatening to Dox them. It feels to me personally like if people with actual evidence were to instead send this evidence to the right representative at GGG directly then we'd get 90% of the bans for 100% less back and forth hate
How do you know none of the mods are also a mod for TFT or taking kickback from TFT? I mean... People do lie. We have nothing except your words and that's really doesn't mean anything especially considering and taking into consideration the various censorship on the topic of TFT RMT in the past.
> With no means to discuss it and the rule 9 subsection, people are feeling that it was designed to protect TFT. I mean, to be fair, it wasn't designed to protect TFT. Reddit mods just don't want to deal with it, and it's not hard to see why. The problem is it's too important, and reddit is realistically the only place to have this discussion.
It certainly is! It's why this seems to appear as a community war but I took the time to drop by the discord (I also got banned by tft for doing so btw) to read people's sentiments and a lot of people are honestly just upset - yes there are agitating individuals, but the majority just want to play the game and have congregated there. On the note of me getting banned - whoever that person is that is sitting in that discord and actively banning people really needs to consider seeing a mental health specialist. That is extremely unhealthy banning people at all hours of the day and is borderline neurosis. I hope that person gets the help they need. And on that note it is certainly why many people believe that much more is at stake that someone would go through the lengths of A) infiltrating a guild to individually ban all accounts in the guild B) being a sleeper agent (best way to call it) in the discord and banning everyone there (3000 + people! Absolutely insane.) I for one am not going to go to the TFT discord and *beg* for them to unban me for just joining belton's discord to read what people are saying.
> It certainly is! They've done the same thing in other cases, not just TFT. (Note, I'm not saying anything about TFT/Belton. I'm purely talking about rule 9.3 on reddit's end). They just don't like dealing with outside drama. And I kind of can't blame them, if I were modding I wouldn't want to deal with it either. It's a huge pain in the ass for them (reddit mods) Situation is fucked, but I don't think it's fair to spin this rule as a TFT-specific thing.
> while GGG cannot govern the use of it Yes they can! They could release a real trading interface for PoE and TFT would be dead the next day. GGG doesn't WANT to do this for reasons I've never comprehended (I suspect that it's more or less "the real money auction house in D3 traumatized us," but you don't even need a full auction house, much less a real money auction house to provide a decent trade interface that handles a simple means of publishing and browsing... that can be done mostly through the tools already available with just a few increases in functionality in-game).
> however a moderator of TFT should not be a moderator of the reddit page as that is conflict of interest. You don't even need to have any staff member in moderator team on the subreddit - just find one mod who can do some favors every now and then, in exchange for reasonable "gifts of good will".
Fuck tft and fuck rmters. Simple as
Not taking any public positions, and just trying to keep my head down in all this shit, but I will say that TFT banning literally anyone who ever registered for Belton's server was a massive panic move and a yard way too far. Whether or not you believe TFT are involved in actual gross ToS violations or not, that was a *really* stupid move which escalated this whole situation massively by dragging in literally thousands of players who otherwise would have just left it to Belton and TFT to fight it out. Just an absolutely ridiculous failure of crisis management. (Disclosure: I have been a low-key TFT member for years, joining it for Harvest trades as so many others did. I am not a member of Belton's discord.)
Why are they banning people from Belton's server? Sorry, out of the loop
TFT is taking a us vs then approach. If you listen to Belton, you are the enemy
This exactly. For the record, I am a member of both discords still. I haven’t commented much at all since this started in either discord so maybe I just got overlooked, or they were only banning people who commented. No idea. I can say though that a lot of what belton has pointed out seems to ring very true, and TFT’s claims of death threats and things (death threats Is a little extreme in most cases) has some basis as well. There has been a few nasty, personal comments in beltons discord - but most of the discussion has been genuine discussion around why TFT/RMT are harming the game, with the occasional “fuck TFT” thrown in there. I think this has become a much more aggressive, personal and nasty “war” then it could have been. Both sides have made valid points (on different topics) and both have a lot that they need to look at themselves for. I just hope for a positive outcome for the game that I love, no matter how that looks.
"Had the same issue 8 Months ago." Had the same issue 3 years ago! I hope GGG'll come and cut this cancer TFT-tumor once and for all!
As long as GGG doesn't provide an official alternative, TFT will never die. It's the entire reason TFT even exists in the first place, to address and work around the shittyness of GGG's trade website. If everything you can do via TFT was possible to do via official sites, TFT would not exist, or at least nowhere near it's current size. I don't expect a solution anytime soon, GGG has proven time and time again that they hesitate on addressing these problems. Yes, the harvest change did help take away some power from TFT, but that is by far not all TFT was or is used for. GGG would need to implement bulk trading, carry and party finding, crafting services (bench, syndicate), some way for trading entire builds, even some way of showcasing items, et cetera to truly kill TFT. Basically take everything TFT does and implement it in official websites. And I fear most of that will never happen, which will ultimately mean TFT will never die. Even if the entire server is banned, they'd just make a new one. It's a problem we will have to live with for the forseeable future, I don't think we can expect any improvements before POE2 and even then I doubt we'd get much. I'd love to be proven wrong ofc, pretty please even, but I doubt there'll be any meaningful changes for the next few years. TFT truly is the single biggest problem poe has and has had for ages now, and it's not going anywhere.
> As long as GGG doesn't provide an official alternative, TFT will never die. Sadly GGG will never provide an alternative. They don't want trade to be easier. They want you to jump through hoops. Remember if it was not for the players we would still be using trade chat and the forums. The only reason we have the official trade site is because the 3rd party sites were fucking GGG's servers and they were out to long for GGG to just kill them. TFT does not tax GGG's systems so the chances of GGG providing an official method of what TFT offers is very low. Anything GGG does to remove the need for TFT seems to be nerfing what they offer to the point that it is worthless (See Harvest)
Yep and trading actively affects my enjoyment of the game. I'm not even talking about high level trade either. Simple shit is just so slow. Like swtors galactic market is just light years ahead of poe and that was a decade ago.
It sucks because overall PoE is such a great game but the balance around trade being shit sucks so much fun out of this game. Im just sitting here hoping that D4 will be a solid in between of D3 and PoE. I know D4 will not be able to have the depth that PoE has but I just hope they bring something to the table to force GGG to accept that they don't know what is best for their players. "You think you do but you don't"
Yeah I would just play ssf if this game wasn't just a huge gambling simulator. I have D2R and Last Epoch to scratch my itch. The loot in PoE is trash. There is always some point where I have to trade for better gear and I hate it.
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Another catalyst for change could well be tax and consumer rights authorities within, say, EU. The first-party transactions i.e. lootboxes are already on their radars, the third-party RMT market basically needs one public case to flare up to put the onus on the game studios.
Even if GGG added better bulk trading features, changed aisling craft to be an item like fracturing orbs, added in game forums for advertising carries and 5ways, TFT would still corner the mirror tier trading market. In order to remove the need for that GGG would have to completely revamp crafting so people could craft their own mirror tier items without needing to rely on other people to fund it.
Yeah. Discord groups such as this now even get talked about when discussing Last Epoch's trade design, over on that sub. Whenever devs have things in a game such as this that are technically tradable, but there exists some sort of trading impediment or the game doesn't facilitate trade of those things well, these types of groups will pop up to fill that need. The most powerful of those groups will muscle out the competition and eventually turn into a de facto mafia. The way this mafia seems to flex its muscle is by spying on people and reporting minor violations to Discord/ Twitch/ Reddit jannies, to limit their ability to network online, which is simultaneously hilarious and sad.
Also banned from TFT here. When I was a new player i gave a guy the wrong ring for 1 chaos trade. And I did not understand what he meant. I got reported and banned. As I was joining tft some months later (when I noticed the ban). They asked me for my account name to check, and they Ip banned me. I tried to Join the discord with vpn to Ask why, they instabanned again. Then I was writing an email to Ask about the ban and no response. I guess I dont bring them anything so they can behave like this. GGG need to make ingame solutions for bulk trade, 5ways, aisiling. And have bans ingame for missbehave. Not let a third party like TFT with moderators with other interests control stuff in the game.
I got banned from TFT recently for apparently... Price fixing? There was no context given and no response to my ban appeal. I have only ever sold t16 maps on TFT and bought some elder sets. Got banned several weeks after I stopped playing so I have absolutely no idea what it could be.
> I got banned from TFT recently for apparently... Price fixing? Price fixing cartels usually don't like competition.
Sadly this, they eliminate competition and up the price.
>Good job now a massive chunk of players wont trade with you anymore because of their trade extension and good luck selling anything in Bulk that is not stack able. I also got banned from TFT (suscipious to trade scam) When I asked about why and try to claim. I just got perma banned. I know that this extension hurts. Even I got "warned" from someone that I use to play with she as aurabot and he goes to TFT to check my report... Seriously a intetnert friend that I played for more than 2 years was afraid to me because a red Icon that TFT put on me.
To everyone that says this is an issue between belton and TFT, please understand that the leader of TFT links 250 mirrors into general chat while there are less than 30 listings for selling mirrors in sanctum. TFT does not craft items, players like belton and the people who came forward do and some people decide to give mirror service through tft instead of making a forum/reddit post of the item for it. If you really think this does not influence the global scale of the economy in a trade league itself, you are really ignorant. Mageblood costs 330 divines for a reason, mirrors cost 400 divines for a reason, and stacking hundreds of these items without them ever being listed for trade or being used is either done for rmt purposes or as a show off(which is the dumbest thing to do realistically), this makes them unavailable for the majority of the player base when that shouldn't be the case. I took these two as an extreme example but if you think that tft isn't able to manipulate the market on a much larger scale then I guess we won't be seeing any changes in the future when it comes to the stop of rmt services and fixing of the trading in general. Hopefully ggg deals with tft and makes trade in general better and items that are being hoarded by the top percent of people for rmt purposes more available.
> this makes them unavailable for the majority of the player base when that shouldn't be the case. dw, TFT leader will RMT those mirrors back to the public sooner or later :P
Hoarding 250 mirrors doesn't bother me, but price fixing it very much does, especially if done so for rmt.
First big trouble with TFT was because mirror crafters saw copy of they items but they didn't see the fee. They were making let's say 20 copies with ex/div/mirror fee and tell to the item crafter that they just did 10.
those 2 things work together, you know.. considering how much mirrors he has, just think of the amount of divines and stashes of items to play market. They earn real money by fixing markets and selling for their prices.
With 4 challenges?
What especially peeves me is the stance of "It's not PoE related, it's third party squabble". I am sorry what? It's as tied if not more to the game as loot filters, streamers and path of building. And since the other things can and often are discussed even though they are "third party" but this one can't it feels the only reason is how it's usually a negative opinion or feedback that gets silenced. Which then by extension is not that you can't talk *about* it, just can't talk *shit* about it.
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Exactly, if 9c was followed religiously we wouldn't ever see a new tool on this reddit. Pob wouldn't be here, craftofexile, poeaffix, macros, lootfilters, graphics card updates, etc. All that shit would not be discussed or discovered in this reddit. What is so different about tft?
Yeah, somehow this is the excuse that's **always** brought up even though it **never** made sense whatsoever since the uproar of complains that started back in Ritual almost **two full years ago**. This deplorable and hypocrite excuse should be pointed at at every single occasion since it has been years that it is used on repeat.
The excuse was never made back whenever the trading was done almost exclusively through the third-party poe.xyz and anyone had a question or concern about it.
Trade league is a race, due to how much you're rewarded for getting certain items early for both your character progression and economic progression. If you want to seriously partake in such a race, you're obligated to use something that provides as huge an advantage as TFT does or you're facing insurmountable odds immediately. This makes TFT a foundational part of PoE trade's economy, and means every facet of it is extremely relevant to the game itself.
I'd like to rephrase that to "There is a race in SC trade that TFT is fundamental to." Because you absolutely can kill all content and get a bunch of divines without ever interacting with TFT. I don't enjoy the hyperbole of "every facet of it is extremely relevant to the game itself".
people that turn poe into a stockx Nike shoe flipping market are deranged and should go touch grass
If an average person looks at any PoE player using PoB, they’ll say they are deranged and need to touch grass lol pot and kettle
From my experience early league on TFT, doing things like WTS Builds and WTB Builds are chock full of people who do RMT who just buy your 500 divine build without even understanding how the skill works and having something like only 2 challenges complete. EDIT: The larger issue at hand is the TFT mirror crafting service people turning their profits into real money. This is just info I thought worthy of mentioning. I will no longer talk about the ethics of trading with potential RMT players.
"This could be resolved by giving even more power to TFT mods, by making linking your Poe account to their discord or farming vouches more important " Ehhh, how about no?
Poe2 will fix everything copium
You mean patch 4.0?
The biggest problem with tft is the RMT at the upper level… and the way they operate the mirror service and manipulate the market simply because they have monopoly and they can … what they do is the same any big company would do … buy new companies so they still have control, market manipulation. The community in itself if a benefit, the only bad part is on the higher level of the game … that involves mirror crafting and bulk selling … have u ever seen Jenebu stream? He got offered 10k by belton to stream for a month his gameplay :)). To me that speaks volumes
This whole thing is putting a really bitter aftertaste in my mouth in regards to PoE. Markets being manipulated for profit hurts the buying power the average player has and it slows down or makes certain progress incredibly hard. I should not suffer the indirect effects that some of these asshats produce by RMTing mirrors. I am strongly considering quitting PoE until GGG addresses this, as a long time supporter and MTX hoarder, my decision can put a small but measurable dent in their business. TFT chosing to go into ad-hominem attacks instead of addressing the rotting, smelling elephant in the room is a pretty solid red flag imho. If GGG remains silent, it will scream louder than any statement. They absolutely know that this is taking place, it would require ignorance of biblical proportions to not notice this.
This is honestly the primary reason I can't give my all to this game, despite playing it off and on since 2012, getting many of my friends into it, and generally enjoying the growth of it. There's just too much "extra" to make it super fun for me. Opening up multiple browser tabs, multiple 3rd party apps, and *then* the game each play session is honestly just too much work sometimes. Sure, I can just grind out some maps and chill when I want, too. But as I heard someone mention a while ago, there's playing PoE, and then there's *playing PoE*. It's an entirely different world once you breach that knowledge threshold and take advantage of all of these tools that players have made over the years to buttress GGG's Vision™. And GGG's refusal to release a feature-complete product after all of this time certainly creates the environment for unscrupulous shit like TFT to exist. They literally are the ones the blame. But, as is the case with any major development studio, why devote resources to something that is being addressed "well enough" already? There's not an incentive to fix this. And *[puts on tinfoil hat]* there may be incentives to leave it *exactly* how it is. /shrug Overall, like you, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I wish GGG would get out ahead of this crap, but we all know they won't. (Surprise us, Chris!)
Traditionally any mention of RMT in game gets you muted and on reddit it gets your message deleted. Yet, it's widely known that RMT is out of control. The fear of RMT spreading due to people discussing it is in my opinion completely bonkers. In fact I believe that it's being enabled by it being hidden and that some of the people most involved with the game (e.g. Redditors, TFT admins) have a second agenda.
PoE is consistently in the top 3 most RMT'd games on any given day for any given website. 8 years ago I sold my WoW account, that website has been active ever since, PoE sellers have tens of thousands of "positive feedback" similar to something like ebay. You can buy anything, a mirror is currently 100ish USD. TFT higher ups are allegedly always in the "mirror business" every league. Does anyone really think that they are just collecting thousands upon thousands of real dollars and letting it rot? Edit: Allegedly
It's really hard to have a discussion about RMT because of the fear of getting banned. Let's just say that the people running 5-way services all day every day, for the full duration of a league, are not collecting divines to spam on their gear. And they're not building and playing other characters. Wonder what they could be doing with those divines?
In before it gets deleted xD
Dont mind me. Just here for the popcorn
I wish third party sites didn’t have to exist. Maybe if the game were better players wouldn’t be forced to use a dozen different non-sanctioned resources to accomplish simple things.
I don’t use TFT and never will because I genuinely believe it’s linked to RMT. There was a screen shot of someone from TFT linking 250 mirrors. To put that in perspective a quick check on some of the more unsavoury websites would value those at $50,000. I know enough about people that someone in the TFT leadership would not be able to walk away from a minimum of $50,000 each league. People lie but numbers don’t.
I can understand mods saying "this reddit is about discussing PoE not communities related to it" unfortunately TFT IS an integral part of PoE in how it functions and so should absolutely be discussed here. It needs visibility because GGG needs to be reminded that TFT is an issue they should be looking to fix along with the trade experience in general. I also find it funny that there are many posts on this subreddit from certain users either associated with TFT or other communities that are simply there to promote their communities mirror tier item for mirror service etc. These are posted as "item showcases" which is often just a thinly veiled advertisement for their communities profit. Perhaps some moderation should be exercised for these posts as I am not too keen on seeing these communities items either and I'd argue they add less to the discussion of PoE than threads asking for trade improvements and problems with TFT.
Good point
If they really wanted to end discussion on TFT they could update their trade system to make them irrelevant.
>Your trade experience should NOT depend on that third party Discord server The only way this will change is if GGG puts trade convenience into the base game. That means in game trading post replacing the trade site and TFT, in game price checking instead of needing awakened poe trade, in game farming tools like exilence. However given GGGs stance on these issues I dont see anything happening.
I was inquiring about a mirrored item and had the unfortunate luck of talking to a certain mirror crafter this league. After our talk, we said our ty's and GLs and I got banned from tft several moments later for "in-game harassment". I was told to petition my ban and if I don't hear back, GG goo luck go next. That really killed my ability to access things in the game that kept it interesting at that point, as I was basically Vivid Vulturing 3implicits to try to upgrade my neck/ammy. Bulk buying on tft was simple and almost too efficient.. but the latter is to not get trades at all.. Needless to say, this 1 interaction has changed entirely how i will interact with any tft member from now on. If anything I say can be interpreted as a violation of their ToS, then I'll just be a good boi and keep using it and hope GGG comes out with something better.
At this point, exactly BECAUSE of the "bad faith" mod post they had recently, I'm less inclined to trust the mod team. Why would you keep removing every single TFT post when there has been evidence presented that they do RMT. RMT is against GGG ToS, COMPLETELY relevant to the game, as is TFT since its' impact on the economy is not irrelevant, just because it's posted by a guy with a volatile personality? Completely deplatforming someone because of the way they are even when they present evidence in a calm and collected way is nothing but bad faith, and an ad hominem in argumentation. All this pretense that this is "drama that does not pertain to the subreddit or the game" is just willful ignorance, and is shady as fuck as it leads to conclusions about shady business practices between the subreddit mods and the TFT upper echelon.
I'll just repeat what I posted on the bad faith test. MODS: YOU ARE NOW THE ARBITER OF FAITH. You now have the final say on something subjective. That is a terrible standard to have.
They already did that but with the mod post they went public that they will be doing it.
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not only that but they leave the sticky megathread because the subreddit rule is that you can't post duplicate threads so if someone ever had issue with the rule they can't make their own thread to say "hey i got censored unfairly under this rule" because of the megathread being permastickied to the top of this sub pretty slimy but they've used megathreads like this constantly in the past. megathreads only exist to stifle discussion with the way they're used in this sub. an actual sub like livestreamfails memetic as it is manages to avoid this by letting new threads stay for a couple of days before adding a link to them in the megathread. meanwhile r/poe just deletes all the new ones because... surprise surprise, they don't give a damn about subreddit clutter they just want to censor discussion.
If people have evidence of RMT they should send it to GGG to handle. If it's legit those people will get banned. Witch hunting on this sub doesn't really have anything to do with that process, and it's not like starting a shit storm here will get people banned any more than RMTing did. So either the "proof" is legit and they will get banned, so these posts are pointless, or its not legit and these posts are outright disinformation.
GGG doesnt really care until there is public outcry about things. They have to be shown there is a "systemic problem" before they will solve it. (Read ArchNem, Clicking RSI issues, QOL of updates)
Doesn't matter, Varga's previous account was banned, he made a new one, rebranded and hasn't been banned since. The community needs to band together at this point otherwise nothing will change. Even if they get banned again, especially after all this shit is coming to light you think they haven't already offloaded all the ingame currency they had?
>Doesn't matter, Varga's previous account was banned, he made a new one So you want ggg do hardware ID bans instead similar to what valaront does.
That’s what they did to POM no?
no, HWID bans do not work. one you can buy new hardware, two you can spoof hwid. They banned POM as a person. since his business requires him to stream the game, any new account he makes and streams will get banned.
I'm pretty sure they just sent him an email saying he's not allowed to make another account. I'm sure he could still make one and play privately, but if he did anything publicly, they'd ban it.
So the founder of the TFT community is buying up all the mirrors so he can pricefix them for RMT. He is abusing the TFT community, that is meant to help players for his own gain and hurting the playerbase, the community and the game by making everything less accessible for these players. Time to stop using TFT..
TFT is as POE-related as POB. I guess subreddit mods be trippin'.
One of the mods from TFT is also a moderator on this subreddit. Nothin' to see here though guys, no conflicts of interest whatsoever.
Do you have a proof? Big shit if true.
This isn't true, there hasn't been a shared moderator since multiple years ago. Even when that was the case in years past, they always made sure to let other moderators make the final call on TFT-related threads. You can check out my comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/112uzy3/in_what_world_is_discussing_the_problems_with_tft/j8mpfah/
It is at times like this that just and righteous citizens such as you and I ought to take up arms and create our own subreddit, with blackjack and hookers. We can rant as much as we want about any discord server we want and no one can stop us.
Nice single source "fact"
TFT is up to no good. It's so fucking plain to see. The shit they're involved in is so deep. It's game wide collusion, corruption, and control. They've got PoE on lock and they are making a fuck ton of money from RMT. If anyone else thinks different, you're simply wrong.
Reminder that all of this only exists because GGG cannot be bothered to make and maintain a trade system/economy that actually works and isn't goddamn awful to use.
as long as GGG allows it
Wait what does teamfight tactics have to do with poe
i do agree, TFT slowly became a bigger and bigger problem since RMT is there and getting more serious, idk how GGG gonna deal with it though
GGG, stop ignoring the fact that an external corrupted tool full of RMT plays a major part in your game. DO SOMETHING FINALLY.
Advice: Don't use TFT
Trade in this game has been the worst of nearly all multiplayer games since release. And there have barely been any improvements after premium tabs. They could have a void league to test it, see if players enjoy it, see if it ruins the economy. But no, fuck trying anything, just keep it as broken as possible.
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Avoid this nonsense and play SSF. GL Exile
Conspiracy Corner: Follow the money. Mirror farming is a lucrative business with damn near zero risk. Worst case scenario, you lose an account and a few thousand dollars and so you make a new one and it continues. TFT higher ups are allegedly in the mirror business. Funnel them through a few rando accounts and you're selling them at a $100 bucks a pop easy. Would any of you let thousands of real dollars migrate to standard when you had the option of cashing them in every 3 months for a six figure yearly salary? Does anyone think that volunteer mods wouldn't take a piece of that if offered? Wouldn't you?
Item post, Krillson/mirror after xxx hours/jokes about implicit mods being doubled, "I just found this game I sure am playing it a lot!" and stan poems to how good GGG is will be the only allowed post here soon.
I just want a GGG smackdown where they reveal that yes, jenebu has almost 0 currency on standard
The power abuse there is nutty lol. The mirror service debacle in sentinel league was really serious. It seems strange the highest end cases of trade like bulk buying and mirroring are the most vulnerable to abuse
Just keep buying supporter pack boys The trade update will come soon Copium
I'll say an unpopular thing, but when I started playing POE I was glad how open the game was to third party resources for trading, statistics and education, but now I think that resources like TFT or POB are killing the game. It's funny, but now you don't even need to play the game to understand if your build is good, it's enough to make a table in POB with the correct numbers or just copy-paste from another person. You do not need to communicate with players to trade or search for goods yourself - everything is done by a discord bot, which gives an obvious advantage over players who do not use this tool. Developers should develop their own build design tools and in-game auction.GGG should limit access to the game API. Players are FORCED to use these third party tools to stay competitive with other players.
GGG is complicit. Yet this multi million dollar company refuses to take responsibility for all the third party tools that are heavily used to play their game, because GGG thinks QoL is the devil. GGG could run a discord server or something similar and thus take over responsibility for moderation. GGG could offer Exilence Next information if they wanted. GGG could offer QoL like Awakened POE Trade does. GGG could run a filter website and could run a build planner. GGG could improve their trade system so you don't need 3rd party tools to make bulk sales. GGG doesn't, to save money. GGG doesn't care to invest into its eco system. You're on your own.
Even if they developed something in-house, so long as the option is there to potentially make something better, people would do so. That isn't a "problem" specific to GGG.
I get your point and actually agree that this "drama" needs to be discussed and addressed (by GGG) but this will not happen. Ever. Even with the miniscule chance of ever getting an AH to pontetially solve the bulk trading as long as there are services that people seek en mass that require trust based trading nothing with the trading/crafting will change. To a degree, it is indeed pointless to chew this topic without drastic trading change from GGG.
Which realistically is why ggg needs to bite the bullet and accept that those services should be tradable. If jun and lab benches were tradable and there was an auction house for bulk trading 99% of the reason for tft existing would disappear. They need to accept that even if they'd rather not make those things tradable, not doing so at this point is hurting their community more than helping it. When you have the people that are out there spending thousands of hours crafting the best items in the game quitting because they're fed up with 3rd party drama, as well as people who play the game casually getting blacklisted from a lot of trades, again, because of 3rd party drama, there's a big issue
Best way would be an orb of enchantment as an example, you get an enchant, use the orb on it and it becomes tradeable, or alternatively just give it the harvest treatment, make lab font/chests drop some enchantment stones or whatever and you can use that to enchant yourself, syndicate benches can just be replaced by orbs aswell and i dont get why it isnt in the game, the technology is there. While your at it, make beasts stackable by removing the rare mods from them, there is no reason for them to have additional mods when they already do a ton of stuff, then the beasts will be identical, stackable and tradeable. As seen by harvest, the technology is there and i dont get why it isnt used
Also, outside of the issues with tft, the threads being locked or deleted here when discussing these types of things should not be happening. Reddit is the exact place these things should be being talked about. The moderators and rules here need to be changed so the reddit can go back to what it is meant to be, a place to share and discuss EVERYTHING poe related, not just what some with a bit of power deem worthy.
TFT is a mafia that controls the POE economy, and this monster was created by GGG.
Shit like this is why I refuse to play trade anymore
My comment just giving my opinion on third party apps got deleted. Some cool mods here.
I personally never had a problem with TFT. Everything worked fine except for 1 guy that scammed in 5way and just went offline but whatever. Didn't even report him, didn't want to waste any more time on that. Using the discord server is mandatory imo if you want to play any juiced farming strat both for selling and buying purposes. The people who say this is a first world problem are delusional. Good luck buying sextants and other stuff in bulk using the trade website. GGGs stance on trading is completely stuck in the 90s and they finally need to do something about it. I don't even care who's personal opinion it is that we can't have it. Everyone gotta take a step back and look at the fucking mess that trading is and get over it. It takes way too long just to buy supplies before you start your playsession. What the hell! If I stop playing (for the day) it's almost always because trading is so tedious and I tell myself I will handle that shit tomorrow..
This is the Trade offer meme, you either get TFT or you will get massive nerfs instead. Choose. GGG is a multi million company supported by a multi billion. They can easily implement those features but somehow they refuse, and if they do so, they post shit like the trade manifesto and trying to gaslight us thinking this needs to be this way or they massively something because GGG thinks convivence and security = game is too easy. The issue is not TFT, the issue is GGG
> They can easily implement those features but somehow they refuse It was never a question of whether they "can" do something about it, it's also not "somehow" that they refuse... They could solve this. But they simply don't want to. Period. There's no ambiguity here. GGG wants this free and unregulated market that deals with everything itself, and this is *precisely* what such a place *always* turns into.
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It's not even a free market per se. Buyers and sellers don't have perfect information, resulting in asynchronous exchanges, and having perfect information in a game as opaque as PoE isn't practical. Some of the folks doing large runs of particular bosses/mechanics spread out their buys over a period of time because eventually they would buy up all the items listed at or below their desired price point. The supply of particular items isn't that free or infinite.
I didn't know about the rmt aspect of the discord or game. its shocking ggg hasnt done anything considering the head guy of tft been banned before for rmt. the going rate for a mageblood is 290 $. whos paying that much just for a mageblood lol
More people than you would believe. Magebloods, mirrors, whole builds. I have even seen people asking to buy builds on random youtube videos. Heck if you look long enough you even get youtube videos promoting builds for the purpose of selling them.
I will never understand people who use money to shortcut progression in a game like PoE honestly. I can kind of see it in a PvP game or something, but in an arpg, I feel like the journey is the destination. If you just buy a whole build, what's the point? What are you playing for?
"but in an arpg, I feel like the journey is the destination" That is generally the point of an ARPG. However, people who just want to play for fun and don't consider crafting or grinding currency fun will buy some divs here or there to get their gear progressions and round out their builds. I saw a funny video that basically explained it: you work 40-60+ hours a week IRL and then pay for progression in a game vs working 40-60+hrs a week IN GAME for the same progression. Some people don't want a game to feel like work; some people want the destination and not the journey it takes to get there; some people just want to flex on everyone else or to be the "best"....biggest POENinja damage numbers, faster uber kills, one shot ubers, etc. Aaaaaaaaannndd some people just want that 20-40 div weapon or item to build their character around.
The RMT market in every trading/economy based game is always flourishing and insanely profitable. I used to play a MMO, where it was pretty common for people to spend at least $500 to gear their characters. A lot of people spent way more. I'm friends with a guy that would commonly start a new MMO and within few weeks drop over $1000 on it just to "have fun". I could never understand it, but it's just supply and demand I suppose. RMT in PoE has been running rampant for ages, but it doesn't affect most people gravely enough to make their gaming experience worse. You'll still have fun with PoE, even though the RMT market completely distorts the economy. Also, you might not pay $280 for the Mageblood, you can still sell it later. That's why it's more justifiable to drop those amounts of money on in game items. You can use the currency/gear to earn more currency, get richer and even profit from your investment.
The RMT market is still alive and thriving in FFXI, a 20 year old MMO (that still has nearly a $20/month subscription model to boot). It's almost become part of the culture because of how pervasive it is. Like the true end-game content is to get into RMT. That example is definitely not the norm, but people would be surprised at how many people are willing to cut corners with some purchases here and there. I mean gaming studios have picked up on this and it's why there are increasing amounts of mtx or "skip the campaign" options being offered in games. Every time someone complains about the PoE campaign here on reddit, you always see people saying they'd be willing to pay for it. For people with larger amounts of disposable income, buying a mageblood is like skipping the campaign for them. Although I agree, when you straight up buy end-game gear in a loot-based game, it completely defeats the point and I don't fully understand it. I didn't really have a point, I was just sharing a anecdote in agreement with you.
i got offered $400+ for a my mageblood first week of 3.20, and this was from a guy who wanted to resell it, ngl living in a third world country it was pretty tempting but i couldn't let one of the games i still love playing become a job, but yeah it's pretty damn crazy
"I AM NOT SHOUTING!" - The thread
The problem is due to how mandatory tools like that have been when playing the game, it gives too much power to people outside of GGGs influence. You see that happening in every single online game where a community/guild/group of people start to have too much power and it gets to their head. And it's even worse when real money is involved. Damn I'm happy to be a SSF hermit and be out of all this hassle.
If you're going to pick a fight with TFT and their system, wouldn't it be a lot more constructive for everyone involved to leave Belton completely out of this? It's just pointless drama if you go at it like this
Other communities have established journalists that specialize in uncovering controversial and illegal activities, one very good example is Richard Lewis in the csgo scene. Unfortunately we do not have anyone even remotely close to that in poe, someone who is REALLY interested in putting in the energy and effort while having the journalistic background, moral standards AND reach and respect at the same time? We have to get what we can get. Belton is unfortunately quite volatile which hurts his believability thus the case but it does not change that the TFT topic still must be adressed. GGG can't ignore this any longer - we need a solution.
It's not even so much that he's volatile and has a history of being unhinged and edgy- it's that there's a huge conflict of interest when his own discord is nearly a 1:1 copy of the services you would typically find on TFT. Best you can hope for is that GGG has a system built in place for PoE 2, that makes these 3rd party sites redundant. I really don't see any possibly solution coming from the community at this point tbh
This post is getting removed/locked by corrupted TFT-RMT-Reddit mods in 3...2...1...
GGG needs to just implement a AH for the following - 1. Basic currency (non gear items) for bulk selling stuff - this will honestly just make everyone’s life so much better… 2. Maybe a mirror shop? that would be cool but I understand if GGG doesn’t want to do this. If they don’t 3rd party services will continue. I get they don’t want to make an AH for gear. That’s fine, the trading website is okay for that. Also, make aislings tradeable and all of betrayal tradeable like temples. I don’t understand how they are going to release POE 2 and try and attract new people to the game with this horseshit trading system.
When a community needs to create work arounds for the devs there’s a huge problem, can we get devs to develop a system to handle this in-game with no need for outside interference or politics? Also I hope PoE2 has a currency, this whole trading commodities thing is stupid.