Quote Originally Posted by Kaurhz View Post
If you look at botting is just a singular person issue or an infrequent issue then yes, of course, monitoring that is an easy undertaking for someone, but when you multiple that singular person by potentially thousands and thousands of reports, with many more reports amongst those already potentially being false and someone feeling griefed, then you are not going to be looking at a minimal undertaking. The volume of people undertaking it changes that effort dramatically, at which point you are looking for more automated systems to analyze behavior because it simply isn't really feasible for a relatively small team to undertake it. Barring a person having 40 retainers as that is insane and a case of the blatantly obvious, especially if in fact true. But if profit margins are there then people will be willing to undercut fairly frequently (If you don't get the sale someone else does, and then they resupply), and a lot of people find it inconceivable that a person would be willing to do this, but they will, and many of them will end up being reported anyway.
If I were to call you a name in game, and you report me, I would be dealt with rather quickly. The reason the same attention isn't paid to bot reports is because there is probably some policy to ignore said reports and stick with whatever internal means of looking for bot activity they have. For one of the most popular SUBSCRIPTION BASED mmorpgs out there, "its too hard" isn't a good excuse to at least attempt to prevent market breaking activities from happening.

The reason they put so much resources into policing language and negative behavior with regards to other players, is because people are more likely to respond to bad behavior like harassment with quitting the game.. which means less profit for them. Not enough people quit because of bots, so they don't really seem to care if an economy is wrecked.