Fighting the bots.

Hi,
I apologize beforehand if this has been posted before.
I'm fairly new to the game, and I am fascinated of how in depth and well made it is.
However, things that make me be negative about a game like this, is the amount of bots. They really ruin my mentality, and my overall happiness for a game.
I understand it's an impossible battle to win, but you're doing your best to keep it down.
Please consider the following, to make it stay a little cleaner:

Make the game cost 1 USD, if someone is caught hacking/botting/scripting, block that Credit Card permanently.
Only make 1 account available per Credit Card. (I see issues with this one, but would help out.)
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Do some next level account verification. For example:
Could for example be phone number verification, without this, you simply can't play. Adding email etc on top of this, probably won't help the problem.
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I'm positive if the community comes together on this, and find more ideas:
There can be made a method, so botters have to go a LONGER way to be able to bot, which will decrease the amounts of bots...
Maybe they have to borrow friends/familys credit cards(?) - Pretty annoying if u ask me, or the next thing, use a stolen Credit Card.....


- Love this game already, but I dislike the heavy F2P bot easy access.

Until GGG does something about adding auction houses, I'm fine with bots being in the game. Between the price fixers and scammers polluting the trade sites, having something instantly respond and trade is a godsend.

Any more ideas like these?
Or overall think this is a bad take?

The problem is that it is pretty damn hard to recognise them automatically...

GGG can't spend resources to do it manually, so they have to do it automated.

First of all, you can't have ANY false positives. That is, you can't auto-ban people who're actually trading themselves. That puts some VERY hard restrictions on who you can actually ban.

Second, the minute you release a new banning algorithm, the bots will adapt to it and change their pattern so it doesn't work any more.

It is doubtful GGG can do anything about it...

The most bots came because GGG sold most of itself to tencent. They've got their own server, but china is influencing us now

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Rixh1 wrote:

Could for example be phone number verification, without this, you simply can't play.

That would be me out. A computer-based product or service shouldn't have any need to access a phone number I may or may not have.

You wouldn't be missed then, because who the f cares about this?
Possibly only people botting.