Thanks Sqwall for the post. I agree with most of your post, but I have a few comments:

Quote Originally Posted by Sqwall View Post
i.e. I have seen "Signature Notfound" "Obtaining Signature" .....really? that's the name you came up with when you "started" the game.
I was puzzled by this as well. I did a search and found that this isn't the name of a player, but rather it's the value pulled for a user ID that hasn't logged since a patch was applied. I'm not exactly sure why the server doesn't just pull the character's name directly from the database, regardless of their last login, but that does appear to be the case. For example, you'll notice many items crafted by "Obtaining Signature" after a patch. If you submit cheating reports for an account with this name, I'm not sure support will do anything.

Quote Originally Posted by Sqwall View Post
I will now start reporting suspicious names, and if the data proves unsubstantiated then I suppose I was wrong, but if I was right...well.
Reporting is great--assuming that SE does something with the case, which is up for debate--but decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio of reports by increasing the noise would be problematic if it encumbers or diverts resources from investigating legitimate bots. You may be correct in all of your reports, but if you're not, then it's wasted resources that could be used in investigating real bots.

I agree that players don't always act in their own interest, but I would argue that some of the behavior you describe can happen from legitimate players.

- I'm not sure what you mean by suspicious names, other than the "Obtaining Signature." The bots I've encountered have all had "legitimate" sounding names. I've also interacted with players with illegitimate names.

- In my experience, I've witnessed market crashes more from legitimate players than bots. There are legitimate reasons a player might want to sell items below the cost of mats--for example, they may not be buying the mats.

- In reading through the thread, it's clear that everyone here has reported these bots multiple times. This thread is in response to SE USA/Europe's inaction to these reports.

- I agree that this should be exceedingly easy from SE's perspective to address, but here we are.