How much RMT in PoE? A RMT site has 1115 post per day for BSC compared to PathofExile.com's 775/day

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silumit a écrit :

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Artaniz a écrit :

The idea that any % beyond 5-10 of the games community visits ["official" was omitted here, I suppose?] forums is absurd.

just as an idea that any % beyond 5-10 of the games community visits RMT forums.

Except my 5-10 % number comes from a myriad of past analytics in the industry and is usually considered the baseline of people that visit forums, and that is in Steam , when a simple shift + tab gets you right to the discussion board. Having to alt + tab , open google , then navigate to forums means its likely fewer here.

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bdy a écrit :

There isn't. But, if you compare trading posts on POE website vs a popular RMT site for standard, you'll see standard a historical total on the 1 single popular RMT site has 30% of the post that the OFFICAL site does. Which could mean:

- 30% of the players do it
- 15% of the players do it but are 2x as active since the beginning of POEs existance
- 45%+ of players do it because standard is super low population 25% of the year due to challenge leagues. (Or many players sell their items in standard after the league to buy in the following league - remember this is just 1 site I looked at I don't even know how many sites there are and this doesn't include the one I see get spamming in trade chat all day by bots)
- Or any combination of the above. I'm just raising the discussion to see if anyone knows the extent of this issue or even a way to quantify it. It's plausible the amount of RMT that goes on is way higher than many assume and GGG just doesn't have the proper tools and financial means to deal with it.

Don't forget that public stash tabs and poe.trade allow in-game trading without ever visiting the official forums. Also buyers might just contact the seller ingame without posting on the forums, and the sellers can update their initial post with new items without creating new posts. So the number of posts on the official forums is a poor indicator of trading activity.

I can't claim to know how RMT sites work since I've never used one. Maybe they offer similar services, but that would just make comparing post counts even more pointless.

I'm not saying RMT isn't a problem, just that comparing forum post counts is a meaningless metric in gauging its severity.

Trying to prevent people from using RMT is as useful and smart as USA alcohol prohibition.

You either have to change mentality of people or come with a way to obtain items that makes RMT sites obsolete. Maybe something like Guild Wars did?

But in the end even if people use RMT so what? Its not like we have pvp competition where things like that would matter.

not going to read the whole thread BUT, assumptions are being made about how many people are using RMT.
mainly ,not all players trade, it's a safe bet that most don't or do so very little.

I know for a fact that they do ban for RMT, most of them don't post about their ban though, only the exceptional idiots like that one a few months back that "gifted" real money to someone who then "gifted" them in game items and was foaming at the mouth about how unjust his ban was.

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bdy a écrit :

...it may be a problem out of control with upwards of 40-50% of players making RMT trades.

You know that meme about stats on the internet...

i bet there is a lot of posts from people bumping their threads on that RMT forum.

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Tin_Foil_Hat a écrit :

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xMustard a écrit :

im more concerned with where the rmt products come from. i imagine they sell all kinds of currency like exalts and shit, where do they come from? gotta be from flippers and bots.

im a little more concerned with there being stacks of mirrors after just a few days of a brand new league. then a supreme minority of people are able to flip and trade or w/e they do well enough to obtain the majority of the wealth?? what the hell is happening.

Most probably come from hijacked accounts. Im sure though that people in poorer countries probably do it as a job or side job. From what ive seen POE stuff sells for alot.

Yup. I read a post by Chris a ways back saying the same thing. Unfortunately most of the loot RMT guys get come from theft. They either get the password of the account by simply asking ("hey give us your password and then we will fill if for you with the stuff you bought") or they just flag it for later hacking. He seemed pretty frustrated as I'm sure players would be sending emails to support and after investigation, all support could do was ban their accounts. Not a very good use of resources.

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Artaniz a écrit :

The idea that any % beyond 5-10 of the games community visits forums is absurd. I have 9 friends that play PoE , im the only one that ever visits the forums , many of them had never been until until yesterday to get the free box for Christmas. The fundamental premise of your equation that overall player % can be derived directly from forums is a beyond flawed idea.

I think stats are really really low with regards to forum involvement with any game. I join forums for most games I play at depth so I've joined a lot over the years but most don't. I agree your numbers look pretty good. I was going to say about 10% but I can definitely see 5. The fact is the vast majority of people don't.

Hey, rmt affects in a way mostly the super dedicated and competitive players. If you are not one of those, why bother.

Also think about the third world botters, some of them rmt for a living.

It can be pretty easy to spot RMTers a lot of times. They will be the players with a lot of wealth, and shockingly good gear, and absolutely ZERO clue how game mechanics work. When you see a dude post here asking for help with his build, and he has 2.5K life, on a level 69 character, that is using 50 ex worth of tier 1 gear, but doesn't understand why he's getting one-shot by Voll in Dried Lake, or why his level 1 CWDT isn't setting off his level 18 IC... the red flags go up.


I don't think it would be unrealistic to say that a relatively significant percentage (like 10%) of players have engaged in some kind of real money trading, but at the same time, 40-50% seems like an outrageously high number. I know personally of my friends in this game, something like MAYBE 5% of them use any kind of RMT or have ever done so. While it sucks, and is 100% cheating and SHOULD be bannable, I don't believe that it is a significant enough number to have an actual effect on the game as a whole. Yes there are probably instances where it negatively affects the economy for those of us playing legitimately, and denying that botting and RMT exist and are bad for the health of the game would be naive as fuck, but I still don't accept that it is nearly as rampant as OP suggests.