Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Jojoya]

Bots certainly don't seem to get dealt with in any reasonable time frame. Market or Gathering. I've seen the same ones and report the same ones each day, that literally sit online 24/7 non-stop.

If they wanted to do anything about them they'd break the Gathering bots because then the market bots wouldn't have the supply to constantly undercut, strangle the weeds by destroying the roots.

It wouldn't even be that much work to nail any of the bots. Heck if they use SQL database you could do a query literally for how long their session for the character has been active. Heck, sit a person at gathering nodes like Sandalwood Sap and Ala Mhigan Rock Salt and you'd net at least 2-3 bots an hour. For the market bots just do a check on number of actions per minute and items on market and how long they've been in a given zone/not afk. Pretty easy you could automate that whole query set to identify and ban.

One week and you'd break the backs of most bots that are currently out there.

Banning bots as soon as they're detected does nothing to break the bots. It just forces the operators to set up a new account, which only takes a couple of minutes plus a small delay to level the character. The bot will continue to function just as it had before on the new character that is now unknown to SE as a bot.

Banning right away makes it harder for SE to find ways to actually break the bots because now they have no bot behavior to observe. That's why bot bans tend to get done in waves. Leave the bots operating so a way can be found to break them that won't also disrupt the game for legitimate players. Once they know how to break the bot, ban the accounts and implement the change. The bot programmers are now stuck trying to figure out new ways to get them to work again. Sometimes they're back within a few weeks, sometimes it takes a few months, but they will return and the "game" starts all over again.

It's safe to say the task force assigned to bots has much better ways to detect bots than players can imagine. They've been doing it for years, and likely they share information with the bot task forces at other MMOs about what gets discovered.

Is it frustrating as a player to watch characters you've reported for suspicion of botting still in action? Sure. But you don't know what's going on behind the scenes that has made SE decide not to take action against those specific characters and accounts. Maybe they allow them to stay active because it helps them identify newly added bots faster. Or there are other reasons.