Last Epoch is having an incredibly strong launch on Steam right now. However, this success is attracting people who want to profit from it. To prevent this, Eleventh Hour Games, the creators of the game, have now disabled Family Sharing.
What is this feature?
- With Family Sharing, you can share your game library with others. This feature is intended for families, so that they do not have to purchase games multiple times.
- Each user of the library still has their own account but can access other people’s games. This is possible even if you are not playing on the same PC. However, the limitation is that the library can only be used by one person at a time.
- The problem with the feature is that fraudsters misuse it to engage in real money trading (RMT). This has recently happened in Last Epoch.
This is what the developers say: The community manager EHG_Kain announced on Discord during the night of March 5, 2024, that Family Sharing will be disabled. Kain writes:
The feature enabled 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, the exploitation of RMT, gold sales, and botting within 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 just a few isolated cases that ruined the feature for everyone. The number of legitimate users was completely outnumbered.
When Family Sharing will be re-enabled is still unknown, but it is supposed to happen if possible. The developers are working on compensations and finding a solution, as Kain stated.
This problem is not new: Even New World had to disable Family Sharing for this very reason and only brought it back under certain conditions. 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:
“RMT and cheaters ruin every. Single. Damn. Game.”
Many players on Discord are outraged by the decision. They believe it is outrageous to remove a feature for legitimate players because of a few botters. Especially when this could result in losing real money items, or worse, loot.
On Reddit, however, the decision is met with much more understanding and triggers anger towards the fraudsters. It is stated there that real money traders and cheaters ruin every game.
In general, one cannot understand why anyone would want to buy gold in Last Epoch. Such people are “pathetic,” claims one particularly upset user, earning a lot of support for this view.
Others can at least understand how such systems come about. RMT is not always driven by malicious intent. There are players for whom time is simply more valuable than money. They would buy gold to have the same experience as players who have more time.
Furthermore, one should not be angry at those who trade game items for real money, but rather at the governments that make this necessary. In some countries, people earn more from gold farming and similar activities in games than in almost any job. This is indeed a rather old problem: In 2017, for example, people were farming gold in Venezuela to avoid starvation.
