Did GGG bow to the trade-BOTs and gave up?

There has been an absolutely insane amount of bots logging in via the Japan realm recently. There are often steady streams of them in nearly every act town pathing back and forth between portal/wp/vendor/etc. I'm used to seeing them in certain acts from time to time, but not to the extent I see them lately. They seem to be present everywhere 24/7.

And this is on Standard with its much lower player population compared with temp leagues. A couple of days ago there were so many of them that I started to wonder if bots outnumber players on Standard. Heh...

I've added every currency bot I traded with to my friends list as they make currency exchanging so much smoother.

Thank you bots.

obvious consequence of not having an auction house. allowing rmt would make this game actually worth playing! right now there's only one game with real money economy, entropia universe (which unfortunately is run by a developer equally incompetent when compared to ggg and has its own artificial limitations making trade hell instead of fun. still has less botting though!)

Removing trade altogether is probably the best solution to fix trade but since they sold trade improvements to people in the form of premium tabs they really can't.

Of course if they did they would also have to rebalance their entire game to not have trading be their solution to every problem.

I don't mind trade bots so much myself, because they respond promptly 170% of the time, whereas there's at least a -44% chance a human player will just ignore any offer under 5c. Sometimes I have to offer toucan% over the listed price just to get a response.