Diablo 2: Resurrected Discord sold out to an RMT website

Well I tried posting this to the subreddit comments popping up now on this story, but they think I'm a spam bot because my story was so long lol.
You guys want drama?

For anyone wondering, the discord server in question is Diablo 2 Resurrected Discord and the admin is /u/LordPermaMaximus. He is also the admin of the /r/diablo_2_resurrected subreddit.

It is alleged proven that an advert for an RMT website was pinged in the announcements channel. Like Rixhi (owner of ChaosSanctuary discord) who disgraced himself only a couple of weeks ago, LordPermaMaximus was a power community-builder when the game launched last year. I was contact by both of them early on, asking if d2io could 'partner' with them, but turned down the offers.

They would both employ aggressive tactics to increase their member count. Direct messaging people in all of the other d2r servers that popping up at the time, and stickying their discords to the subreddits. LordPerma promised alpha keys as a way to massively boost his subreddit and discord power combo. The alpha

Key giveaway never happened.

In later discussions LordPerma asked if I'd be interested in building an RMT/crypto marketplace similar to d2io. From a business perspective it made sense, seeing as he had the largest and fastest growing 'organic' community outside of reddit and the official forums. I turned this down though, wanting to stick to d2io and remain independent.

It wasn't long before I found myself banned from Perma's discord for some reason, despite having had quite cordial conversations before. I only found this out when someone sent me an invite link. Was reported that they also banned mentions of the site.

At around the same time, Rixhi auto-banned all links including the diablo2.io domain name on his discord server, including to non-trade areas of the site like the db and forums. When I asked why this was the case he didn't really defend his decision and then banned me also.

Not long after, Rixhi invited Ketraise's 'Sanctuary' Discord to 'merge' with '

Chaos Sanctuary' (Rixhi's 'cord). I'm not very clear on the details, but what I believe happened is that there was a miscommunication and most of Ketraise's members were moved over to the other server, leaving Sanctuary like a ghostland and giving ChaosSanctuary a boost. This all happened in 2021 up until this point I believe.

If I were to venture to guess what their thinking was recently with the RMT adverts, is that the post-ladder depression is setting in, confidence in the game's future is sadly declining again (lobby, chat, alleged duping, proven botting etc.), and perhaps they feel that running the servers for longer wasn't worthwhile, wanted to cash out and bail. Must have been a challenging task tbh with that many people after all.

Anyway, not sure if this story will even matter that much. I think that the a lot of the initial (and some could argue undeserved) animosity towards JSP has eroded now, and people are just accepting RMT as being a thing which is here to stay, which is sad tbh. I haven't been on either server in a while (because I was banned lol), but they sounded like a good community and I'm sure they'll survive the current outrage.

What I'm really hoping for is that everyone goes back to Ketraie's 'Sanctuary' Discord which you can find an invite link to here by the way: https://discord.gg/PRbFVvn9WP. He has always been supportive of all the different servers, youtubers, streamers, websites like this and is genuinely a nice guy with a good server too. It would be poetic justice if now everyone went back and sought Sanctuary on Ket's server again. See what I did there?

Edit: as an aside, the RMT site that paid LordPerma was ItemD2R, one of the many websites that have copy pasted the 'database' part of d2io onto their sites (theft of content). I'm currently processing DMCA takedown requests against them and a few others. Here's what that looks like: