Quote Originally Posted by Kaurhz View Post
Sure.

False, sure, they will lose some money, but many and I mean many bots operate via trial accounts thus there is no profit barring that which can be used to overinflate their population numbers. So going to disagree with this one.
Aiight, I need to focus on this one. The bots causing the issues such as OP's situation are NOT trial. Trial cannot go into ShB zones. Trial cannot hit level 80. Trial cannot interact with market. Trial cannot trade.

And yet, when I see a nice chunk of the same bots for years going to get aethersand 24/7, am I led to believe these are just trials that would just reappear?

The simple answer is this. Those bots, the ones where actual investment is made, will not come back if banned. And that's exactly why Square won't do it, because they would stop getting someone's money. The only ways they'll ever care are if...
1) The Loss of profits from playerbase dips due to bots, plus the money needed to invest to stop it is greater in loss than what the bots give in gain. Even if it's 1 to 1, where 1 bot makes 1 person quit, they still wouldn't do anything because it costs money to delete it.
2) Publicity gets terrible. We've already seen proof of this, with the PvP hacking. Square did not care at all about people hacking in PvP until it not only showed up on the JP servers, be began to spread over twitter like wildfire in the JP community. They had to take a quick action (prevent trials from pvp) to put a hard cap on it. Weird how reports did nothing for such a long time, but Twitter, the king's of cancel culture, scared them enough? Almost like they could do that the entire time...