I agree with your comments, tierney12, and I think that players that justify or excuse botting are counter productive.

I hope SE implements your anti-botting suggestions, but I worry that these measures are more complicated than the priority level SE has for this problem. As a developer, I think these measures would be straightforward to implement. From what I've seen, SE's anti-botting measures are very rudimentary, like the fishing mechanism.

Honestly, I'd be happy if they implemented simple measures like banning or capping player-to-player gil trades or a captcha mechanism that triggers randomly after being online for over 8 hours. For my first suggestion, RMT could still trade gear and items, but this would have to happen *much* more frequently for each player, rather than having 1 transaction. I also think flagging RMT would be easier, and it would be easier to identify the source of assets, thereby hampering laundering. For my second suggestion, a captcha mechanism could be tied to the lore of the game. Other online services (like Google) have made great progress in solving this problem, and SE wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel.

Finally, I have a comment on scanning for other software running in the background. Even if they did implement this, it wouldn't catch all of the bots. I won't list out methods or techniques. I think this measure would only change how bots operate.