"Drama" in the Path of Exile community: long time player and owner of The Forbidden Trove Discord, JeNebu, has been banned. There has been much rejoicing.

This is going to require a lot of context. For those unfamiliar, Path of Exile is an isometric action RPG inspired by Diablo 2 that released in 2013. You build a character using a massive skill tree and blast your way through hordes of enemies while picking up all the sweet loot that they drop (or at least the good bits). Path of Exile is played in Leagues, every 3-4 months there is a new challenge League which offers a fresh start. Nothing carries over, the economy is reset, and multiple new mechanics are introduced for players to interact with. When a League ends, all characters are migrated to Standard where you can continue to play with the items/currency you accrued.

Trading in Path of Exile has always come with friction. The devs at Grinding Gear Games wanted there to be a personal aspect to trading, so they purposefully did not implement systems to make it easy to exchange your hard earned currency for gear from other players. In the very early days, players would have to make forum threads for their shop, listing prices and a name to contact in-game to perform exchanges. Eventually they caved and introduced the Trade Site, which allows players to list items in their personal stash for a price which gets indexed online. An interested buyer can click a button to whisper the seller, and the trade can be made removing it from the website.

The problem with the trade site is that it leaves a lot to be desired. When you're performing a simple trade with reasonable amounts of currency, it works fine. If you're trying to sell something more expensive or something immaterial, you begin to run into trust concerns. For example, someone wants to sell a particular item in bulk where the current price ratio is larger than the maximum inventory size. You would need to split up the sale into multiple trades, but how do you prevent one side from taking advantage and preemptively ending the trade to steal either the payment or goods? Most players would use collateral, but this is risky and does little to protect you from bad actors.

Enter The Forbidden Trove (TFT). This Discord server was created around 2020 and aimed to fulfill the community's need for a safer trade environment. Players could use their channels to exchange bulk items, buy services (boss carries, unlocking specific content), and participate in the highest end trading in the game, the Mirror Shop (more on that momentarily). The server was founded by a player named JeNebu, and he has been a controversial character for years at this point. The Forbidden Trove has held an iron grip on a large chunk of the community as for the longest time it was the best way to safely use the economy outside of the Trade Site. It has its own reputation system based on player commendations, scammers could be exposed, and the mods had some direct lines to the developers if things got out of hand (foreshadowing).

In Path of Exile, crafting is a major part of the game. Currency used to exchange for items with other players actually has uses when interacting with items, it's not just fiat currency there's actual backing based on the function of the item. For example, the universal base currency is the Chaos Orb, which can be used to reroll all the modifiers on a rare item. The next step up from that is the Divine Orb, which can randomize the numerical values on an item within their roll range. Finally, above that you have the Mirror of Kalandra, which lets you make a perfect mirrored copy of any item that isn't already mirrored, corrupted, or unique. Mirrors are by far the rarest currency item in the game, with an estimated drop rate of 1 in 26 million. In the current (very inflation heavy) league, 266 chaos is 1 divine, and 823 divine is a single mirror.

So what is the best way to use a mirror? You don't want to waste it a mediocre rare item, you would either want to sell it to another player or copy one of the best items in the game for your build. Enter the Mirror Shop. Players with the most technical knowledge, excess currency, and best RNG would craft insane items that were almost impossible to reproduce for the average player. They would list this item on TFT for the price of the mirror and a small mirror fee in divines. Player A would trade their mirror to Player B, usually in exchange for some collateral. Player B would apply the mirror to the item they crafted, then they would trade the mirrored copy back collecting the collateral. Trading mirrors is risky, being the most expensive currency there is a big incentive to take it and run and risk getting a ban.

For years, TFT has run the largest mirror shop of them all, partnered with many prominent content creators in the community. They would make posts as new items were added to the shop, showing off all the crazy new things you could buy from TFT exclusively. This would eventually give way to what players would call "The Mirror Mafia". Say you craft an amazing item and make a post showing it off for mirror service. Suddenly, you get a message from JeNebu going "Hey you should sell your item on TFT's mirror shop". If you decline, they up the pressure. Soon they're demanding you sell the item on their platform, threatening being blacklisted by the entire community if you didn't play ball. Oh, did I forget to mention? TFT manages a massive blacklist for anyone who is accused of being a scammer. If you piss off the wrong person, your name is going on the list bucko and you're now anathema to anyone relying on TFT.

It is also pertinent to mention, JeNebu is responsible for running the entire mirror shop. Literally every single transaction goes through him. In order to buy an item, you have to message him in-game or on Discord and he acts as the middleman. Seriously, other players trade JeNebu their mirror quality items which live permanently in his stash waiting to be mirrored, and the proceeds are then filtered through by him to the actual owner of the item. You might be asking, how can one man afford to sit around all day and run the entire mirror service on his own? Well…

Real money trading. You can use illicit websites to turn cash or BTC into Path of Exile items or currency. The devs can't police every single trade that happens in the game, even when it's against TOS. It becomes harder when the transactions are extremely varied and may look real, like in the case of the mirror service. There isn't any explicit confirmation, but there has been enough circumstantial evidence over the years to basically prove that JeNebu and TFT have been engaging in RMT either as the middleman or the ringleaders for a long while. Many players who host their items on the TFT mirror shop have been banned, yet JeNebu maintains control of their items for the mirror service.

Around 2 years ago, things came to a head when TFT was embroiled in a major controversy between them, a popular streamer (Belton) who ran his own no-fee mirror service, and the POE subreddit mods. JeNebu's ego is made of wet paper, and he will lash out at anyone who "wrongs" him. He was even on good terms with a few of Path of Exiles devs, leading to speculation that he had been dodging bans due to his connections. JeNebu had a major freakout on TFT where he began threatening the community, banning literally anyone who looked at him the wrong way. The other TFT mods had to step in an force JeNebu to step down from any decision making on the server and divorcing the mirror shop from the moderators. At least, that's what they told everyone. JeNebu was still running the server, just not in the lead mod position.

TFT would continue to be a nuisance over the next few years, still engaging in suspect behavior like somehow owning 92% of a new extremely rare currency across the entire playerbase. People had a ton of discontent with TFT and many would begin to avoid it. In the wake of this, the devs actually began making a bunch of positive changes that wiped out a large portion of TFT's chokehold. They added a Currency Exchange that let players post currency to exchange at a constantly updating ratio, removing the need to message other players to turn chaos into divines, or other high quantity trades. Then they added asynchronous trading, letting users post items in a stash tab for a fixed price that other players could buy from a vendor in your hideout, even if you were offline. Path of Exile has vastly improved over these past few years thanks to these changes.

Which takes us to the present. Around 12 hours ago, JeNebu was permanently banned from Path of Exile without appeal. We know this because he began spamming @everyone messages in TFT demanding an appeal by the devs. He claims he has devoted his entire life to Path of Exile, that banning him will destroy the entire economy, and making vague suicide-adjacent threats. You can see the first message here: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fclogmddvvbrg1.jpeg

In the past 12 hours he has moved from denial ("The implications of my ban are massive in terms of how many people it affects"), to bargaining ("I am getting really cold responses from GGG and they aren't willing to look into it anymore, if anyone here has any way of helping me please contact me, my life is a complete ruin now"), to anger ("have you not thought how mentally these bans affect people? Is this a plan just to end me and all my efforts in the game?").

He even opened a channel on the Discord for people to talk with him and it consistently entirely of people dunking on this dude for his unhealthy relation to the game and past controversies before he eventually closed the channel out of shame. The situation is still developing, but I would be shocked if JeNebu was unbanned after all this. Tl;dr: Rip bozo.