Anyone think the bot problem was this bad?

[Arthem]

Punishing bot players shortly after they activate their accounts allows SE to pull money from them while dealing with the bot issue. It becomes not as profitable to be a botter as a result.

I dunno, I'm pretty sure the people/company/whatever running these bot armies don't pay anything for them, or at most pennies on the dollar, for the same reason SE doesn't want people buying mog station items from RMT websites. There's a reason they're able to sell them much cheaper than SE does on the official store, and it's not because they get discount for bulk purchases. They're either stolen credit cards or, for mog station items specifically, many are charged back against SE, costing SE twice for each fraudulent transaction they make and the RMT getting essentially free inventory to sell at 100% profit.

There's no way in hell that selling gil can pay for THAT many subs, even without being banned, and still make a profit to keep their business running and pay overhead and whatever else their expenses are.

This is the same reason indie developers have actually asked people to just torrent their games instead of buying from websites like G2A if they really can't afford to play their game at full price and are going to get it cheaper anyway because they can literally sink an entire indie studio because there's nothing you can do to refute a chargeback, let alone thousands of them.