Path of Exile's richest player and item trading kingpin gets banned and pleads with Grinding Gear Games to restore 'more than 1,500 items, some of which can't ever be recreated': 'This is the worst day of my life'

There's a whole part of Path of Exile that goes unseen by anyone who has never played it. Alongside the monster smashing and loot collecting is a whole item economy that drives players to grind for hours, not for upgrades, but for the cash to buy the upgrades from other people.

Until a recent update that made player trading easier, many players relied on a popular Discord server for buying and selling items or other services. That server, known as The Forbidden Trove (TFT), continues to be the place you go for the game's rarest and most valuable items. But its leader, Jenebu, recently had his PoE account banned, dredging up old rumors of illicit real-money trading (RMT), and leaving the server's future uncertain.

Jenebu's PoE account isn't your typical PoE account. Many of the rarest items in the game lived in his stash because of something the community refers to as a "mirror service." Basically, players handed their best items to Jenebu so other players could duplicate them using an extremely rare crafting item called the Mirror of Kalandra.

This kind of service requires a huge amount of trust that the person with the valuable items doesn't just take off with your mirror. Many people only do mirror services with well-known streamers or, in this case, the owner of a popular Discord server, who is willing to put their reputation on the line.

Jenebu's ban has left a massive hole in the game's economy for anyone who regularly used TFT, and threatens to end the Discord community entirely, which has many players debating on whether or not that's a good thing. There are plenty of popular resources on the server, like channels for players who need help defeating bosses or buying consumable items in bulk. But there's a general distrust among many players for anyone using a third-party platform, where RMT trading in online games tends to run rampant.

I have not found any evidence of Jenebu participating in RMT trading, but TFT is nevertheless an unpopular operation among many PoE players. The PoE subreddit has several threads of people praising GGG for taking action with what seems to be a permanent ban.

In a now-deleted Discord post, Jenebu pleaded GGG to reverse the ban or risk destroying a "700K people server" and an account with "more than 1,500 items, some of which can't ever be recreated."

For now, people are still asking for trades and posting items in the Discord like normal, while others are wondering what will happen to the server in the general chat. All of Jenebu's posts from the last two days have been deleted and he hasn't posted anything publicly since.

TFT has already been losing its relevance with the recent addition of asynchronous player trading, but the loss of the hundreds of items on Jenebu's account might fast forward it to obsolescence quicker than anyone expected.