Last Epoch is removing a popular Steam feature because too many scammers are exploiting it

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Last Epoch is off to a hugely strong start on Steam. However, success also attracts people who want to enrich themselves. To prevent this, Eleventh Hour Games, the makers of the game, have now disabled family sharing.

What is this feature?

  • With Family Sharing you can share your game library with others. The feature is intended for families so that they don’t have to buy games multiple times.
  • Each library user still has their own account, but can access other people’s games. This works even if you’re not playing on the same PC. The restriction, however, is that the library can only be used by one person at a time.
  • The problem with the feature is that fraudsters use it to carry out real money trading (RMT for short). This is what happened in Last Epoch.

    • This is what the developers say about it: The community manager EHG_Kain announced on Discord on the night of March 5, 2024 that family sharing would be deactivated. Cain writes:

    The feature enabled the use of significant RMT and botting and took away our ability to ban accounts faster than they could be shared across the network. This resulted in rampant spam, RMT exploitation, gold sales and botting in less than two weeks. Disabling Family Sharing was necessary to combat these RMT services that harm the experience of all players.

    HG_Kain on Discord

    According to Kain, the fraudsters were not a few isolated cases that ruined the feature for everyone. The number of legitimate users was completely outnumbered.

    It is not yet known when Family Sharing will be activated again, but it should happen if possible. The developers are working on compensation and finding a solution, as Kain says.

    The problem is not new: New World had to deactivate Family Sharing for exactly this reason and only brought it back under certain conditions. The players are still unhappy about it.

    Last Epoch attracts tens of thousands of players and is celebrated on Steam. Here you can see the trailer:

    Last Epoch: The ARPG shows classes, battles and challenges in the launch trailer

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    “RMT and cheaters ruin everyone. Separate. Damn. Game.”

    Many players on Discord are angry about the decision. They say: It is outrageous to remove a feature for legitimate players because of a few botters. Especially if a real money item, or worse still, loot, would be lost.

    On Reddit, however, the decision is met with significantly more understanding and triggers anger at the scammers. It says something like this: Real money dealers and cheaters ruin every game.

    In general, one cannot understand why anyone would want to buy gold in Last Epoch. Such people are “pathetic,” says one particularly angry user and receives a lot of support for this.

    Others can at least understand how such systems work. RMT doesn’t always have bad intentions. There are players for whom time is simply more valuable than money. They would then buy gold to have the same experience as players with more time.

    In addition, you shouldn’t be angry with the people who trade game items for real money, but rather with the governments that make this necessary. In some countries you simply earn better money in games with gold farms and the like than in almost any job. This is actually a fairly old problem: as early as 2017, people in Venezuela were farming gold to avoid starving.

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