Last Epoch developer Eleventh Hour Games has disabled Steam family sharing for the Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 rival due to a “significant amount” of botting and real-money trading that was abusing Valve’s share system. With the action RPG game blowing up since launching into 1.0 there were bound to be players abusing the systems. Eleventh Hour games has taken decisive action that sadly impacts a wider group of players.
While Last Epoch has seen astronomical success since the RPG game launched into 1.0, it hasn’t been without problems. Connection issues of all kinds, including widespread server problems, have stopped the hundreds of thousands of returning players from getting in as much as they’d like, and now Steam family sharing – which lets players authorize other computers to play their games – has been disabled for Last Epoch because people are abusing it.
“We have unfortunately had to disable family sharing on Steam for Last Epoch,” community manager ‘EHG_Kain’ writes on Discord. “This feature enabled the use of significant RMT (real money trading) and botting options, and was removing our ability to ban and remove accounts, faster than they could share them with their entire networks. This resulted in a significant amount of spam, RMT abuse, gold selling, and botting, all within less than two weeks.”
“Disabling family sharing was necessary to combat these RMT services abusing this feature [and] hurting the in-game experience for all players. We continue to prioritize player experience, from quality-of-life features in game design, to incorporating feedback, to social interactions within Last Epoch. With that, we want to ensure you [sic] that we will continue to explore options for how we might be able to support this feature, as well as ban these offending accounts to help keep Last Epoch a welcoming community for everyone.”
Kain adds that Eleventh Hour Games itself was using the feature, but that the widespread ban dodging and RMT abuse meant that “the legitimate users were outnumbered on this one.”
Players using Steam family sharing are understandably concerned that this means they’ve lost all their own loot and purchased items, but Kain confirms that all of the account data for family sharing users is still there, just that one game license may no longer be used for “unlimited accounts.” Even Last Epoch referrals had to be disabled, but at least we all got a bee pet from it.
In another message, Kain adds that Eleventh Hour Games is looking into how the team could bring the feature back online, but says the “RMT abuse of the system was beyond excessive.” At least we’ve got Last Epoch 1.1 to look forward to, with one incredible pinnacle boss on the way.
If you’re amid Last Epoch you’ll want to keep an eye on the best Last Epoch builds and our Last Epoch tier list to give you that edge. Oh, make sure you have the Last Epoch server status to hand in case it seemingly goes dark again too.
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