"Massive ban issue"
I'm getting really worry about botting =/
It might have seemed massive due to our smaller user base, especially how few people post on the forums, but in actuality, it did not affect the majority of users. It did affect a lot of users though, so it wasn't like a super small number, but it wasn't exactly sweeping either. I wouldn't use the word massive though, but it was unfortunate.
The event that is being referred to took place between Oct - Dec 2013. Our method of interacting with the client was causing some issues that resulted in a lot of people getting flagged for no currency/rares and in more extreme cases, banned after a few hours of use.
We, Apoc and myself, rewrote key parts of the bot and released the new version in Jan, earlier this year. That seemed to make a difference, because we didn't have any ban or flag reports for like 3 months. Once the new leagues came around, GGG stepped up their botting detection again and some of the more hardcore botters got hit. Most people who have had ban reports were botting a lot, and this is a small niche game, so as the game's population drops, and botters increase, you can expect detection rates to go up.
Ban issues are always going to be an issue with boting anything, and once again, this is a small game, so it's going to happen no matter what. However, that's not the issue behind the current state of the bot and the lack of various things people would expect to have by now; that was just a speed bump in the bot development road.
The tl;dr reason why EB doesn't have leveling profiles like DB, or a lot of other features, is because Path of Exile is a totally different game than Diablo 3 is. The only thing they have in common is they are ARPGs. Other than that, they are so drastically different in almost all regards, that a traditional bot setup for PoE is extremely hard. For the longest while, PoE was getting near bi-weekly updates, and large patches every month. That's slowed down a little to a major content patch almost every 4 months now, but they have been dramatically changing the game in ways most games don't see for many years.
As a result, the traditional bot development model has shown itself to be a not so great fit for this game. The game requires constant maintenance, logic is always getting outdated faster than it can reach maturity, and new mechanics and skills are always getting added. This makes bot development really challenging, and that's not even considering the technical issues that are present in this game (it's not a Blizzard game).
It's hard to build up a development community around something that is always changing, especially in a game as non-traditional as PoE is. As the game starts to settle down, assuming GGG adjusts their development strategy to not change the game so much so quickly, we'll be able to build up a more solid community. In order to do that though, a lot of things need to be changed in the way the bot was designed, as a lot of the code that was used worked in other bots, but wasn't the best fit for this game. That is the current Beta progression being made right now, changes for the future when the game starts to settle down and become more stable and users can invest time developing for EB.
Considering this is a small niche game that caters to a hardcore crowd, and considering some of the problems the game has that tends to push people away, I foresee the development community for EB remaining pretty small, but that doesn't influence anything we do. Our goal is to provide the best bot possible to users, whether it's 1 user or a 1000, and we keep doing what is necessary to try and meet those expectations.
Hopefully that covers both of the key things said in this thread.
