A Path of Exile player who said they were banned for using accessibility macros admitted that it was a scam to prove how easy it is to deceive others. Path of Exile players admit that they are not banned for using accessibility macros. In fact, they have never used macros and have never been banned. The news was released after the developer Grinding Gear Games conducted an internal search. After the mischief, discussions about the potential negative impact of such false events on accessibility have sprung up.

The gaming industry lacks accessibility options. There have been some bright spots recently, such as the accessibility settings of The Last of Us Part 2, but many games punish those choices by giving them less experience, POE Currency to drop, or even patronizing them completely. Players playing on simpler difficulty are like Cave Story and Wolfenstein: A Case in the New Order. Disabled gamers’ efforts to make games more accessible means that pranks like this can be harmful.

The scam started with Reddit user poelegalthrowaway00, who posted a now-deleted post on a legitimate subreddit explaining that an accident restricted the use of most of their fingers. Therefore, they bound a macro to refresh several potions gains at once, and then claimed that using the macro caused their Path of Exile account to be banned. When the news of the post reached the Path of Exile Twitter, Grinding Gear Games stated that no evidence of the incident was found. According to Kotaku, poelegalthrowaway00 later posted a post that has now been deleted as a confession. Part of the content of the post is as follows.

Many people quickly said that this was a cruel trick. On Twitter, Steven Spohn, the chief operating officer of the charity AbleGamers, which had previously supported poelegalthrowaway00, changed his position after the news of the prank. He wrote on Twitter: “Pretending to be a disabled gamer to harass the company is the lowest. People are already skeptical of people who claim to be disabled. You make the world legally disabled and it’s harder to get the attention of developers. "Chaos Orb in Path of Exile allows you to perform better.