Concerns related to the Russian merge

As you may have read, Garena Russia is ceasing operations and we are incorporating their Path of Exile community into our international one. We feel that this is in the best interests of the entire Path of Exile community, as we want to make sure that all Path of Exile players are always able to play their characters.

We've been working out the logistics of the migration of characters from the Russian Garena realm to ours. Meanwhile, the community have expressed a number of concerns of areas we might overlook. I'd like to address those concerns in this post.

Please note that there are four Garena Path of Exile realms, all run by different teams. Each one has run its own events and makes its own promotional decisions. For this migration, I'm talking entirely about things that have occurred on the Russian realm.

Events with Additional Item Drops
Events with increased item drop rates were voided so that items did not carry over into the main leagues. There were a couple of exceptions like a +25% quantity/+50% rarity weekend event that was run to apologise for some server problems. The additional items found during these few days are tiny in comparison to the impact of some of the leagues we have run in the past on our servers.

Garemon Pets
Some players are concerned that the Garemon Pets (the red Garena mascot) will be merged into our realm. The players who earnt them from promotional events are allowed to continue to have these pets. Because users are placed in instances with other users from the same geographical region, then it's not likely that you'll see these pets in towns unless you choose a Russian gateway to log in.

Exclusive Holiday Microtransactions
Some promotional microtransactions were available as a one-time-only offer on our realm. Similar time-limited offers have been made on other realms, and we feel it'd be fair to allow the users who purchased those microtransactions to keep them.

Botting
I personally supervised the anti-botting systems used on the Russian realm and I can assure you that the rate of botting is extremely low (lower than our realm, and that's already very low for this type of game). When we did find cases of botting, we banned aggressively for it. Trading was blocked for non-CIS users so it was very hard and expensive to run bots on that realm.

Chat
Some users are worried that English chat will be drowned out by people using other languages. Like with our Brazilian Portuguese speakers, Russian users will default to Russian chat channels where they're allowed to use Cyrillic characters and can talk in Russian. We will continue to ask people to use only English in the English channels.

Alternate Art Items
Some Russian race rewards required fewer points to earn than on our realm and awarded alternate art unique items that are very valuable. In a few cases, there are more of these items on the Russian realm than there are on our realm. Moving these over to Standard will affect the value of the existing ones.

This is a real concern, especially because those items were fairly earned by the Russian players, so we're not going to take them away because that would be unfair. To address this, we will mark the Russian versions of these alternate art items as Russian items. They're still fully tradeable and useable, but are clearly marked as different than the ones originally given out on our realm.

(If you're interested in how this decision was made, we have referred back to the original inspiration for these items - alternate art promotional trading cards. We've kept an avid watch on how game economies react to alternate art cards or items, especially when there's an influx of copies printed in foreign languages. An example is English vs. Italian Magic: the Gathering cards from the Legends expansion, for example. The English ones are worth a lot more, and players who want a card that functions similarly but is slightly more available can purchase the Italian version. The presence of foreign cards has in some cases increased the value of the rarer-and-original versions.)

The Russia team ran their Path of Exile realm with pride and with a lot of consideration for their userbase. We're very happy to take it over and want to provide a good home for their community.