Zonureskin map bots: The latest blight on the economy.

[KageTokage]

and you could just as easily false flag innocent people by doing this you realize. You can turn off/minimize your chatbox and turn off game sounds, rendering someone incapable of ever realizing they're being contacted. GM thinks unaware person looks sketchy, sends them a few tells, person never responds, bam. innocent person banned.

Which is basically the reason why banning is slow/never. Square's system is setup that it requires an extreme amount of evidence for someone to be banned, hence why things like stuff said in text chat is so easy to get banned over compared to botting, due to text chat being concrete evidence on their server logs. It doesn't matter if it looks like a duck, if it sounds like a duck, Square won't ban them unless they 100% know for sure it is a duck, and if they think even the slightest bit its a goose, they'll continue investigating and won't convict.

GMs have ways of getting someone's attention outside of just sending tells, like temporarily shoving them into the gaol if they're being unresponsive.

Doing such would also likely cause an actual bot to glitch out and start trying to spam teleport/return to escape which would just make them even more obvious.

A professional team isn't going to allow for false positives, but there's obviously a lot they could be doing better then they are now when the average bot operates for unreasonably long periods of time and exhibits patterns of behavior that are far too consistent for any actual player to duplicate. They're clearly being way too lenient when there's seemingly no way to consistently get a bot of any manner banned, not even ones that are stuck in place repeating a cycle of movement/actions and not going anywhere for hours on end.

I think an "ideal" screening process would be:

1. GM receives report from a player citing suspicious behavior.

2. GM goes to observe the suspect player to see if they're actually demonstrating said behavior.

3. If player is deemed suspicious, GM attempts to communicate via tell to see if they get a response (By asking a question of some sort to ensure they're not giving automated responses).

4. If player does not respond after a certain amount of time and/or number of tells, they get shoved into the gaol and given a further window of time to respond to whatever the GMs asked and will be banned if they continue to fail to react in any manner.

I think that would be reasonable and prevent false positives as no actual player is just going to stand around and ignore their chat after being shoved into the gaol.