In theory yes 
It comes down to how many users you have, how the servers are instantiated - e.g. in LA we have channels 1, 2, 3 and so on which seem to be dynamically created based on how many users are in a zone - which makes monitoring in the backend possibly more complicated.
And as far as Roxx explained it, not only the channels would be a problem, but also the zones itself (e.g. the different continents and areas).
This is what I meant by “you can’t compare game A to game B”.
Now of course it should be possible to have tools available for server wide monitoring. But if these tools didn’t exist in the first place, they need to be developed and it takes time. We could for example assume that SG didn’t see the necessity to have such tools, because they don’t have the bot problem and it would’ve taken several weeks/months more development time. Now these tools might exist and/or are still in development.
Now back to GMS themselves and what I feel is maybe a bit of a misunderstanding.
Of course you could have a GM in the chat and you’d need at least 3 or 4 for the different languages we have (EN, DE, FR, SP). They can be there to help people and yes maybe also issue bans on gold sellers by monitoring the chat.
But the bots are not active in the chat, they are simply running around. So what could possibly happen:
- a monitoring tool says > “bot identified”
- GM “warps” to the zone, looks at the character being identified as a bot > bans the character/account > takes few clicks…maybe just 1 or 2 > just imagine a GM needs to do the same thing when we report someone e.g. give a reason “Account ban issued by GM due to automated notification of server monitoring…”
Easy, right?
Now how many bots are there? I think we can agree there are at least several hundreds on each server. How is a single GM supposed to be able to: monitor the chat, ban gold sellers, answer questions, offer help, jump around from zone to zone and ban bots?
And this is the problem I see. Like I explained you’d need like 3 or 4 GMs for the different languages in chat+ 1 or 2 GMs “jumping” around to ban the bots, because they can’t do both. You can’t read a question and have a reasonable conversation and try to help out and ban accounts at the same time.
In the best case it would be 4 GMs times 3 for a 24h shift and you’d need them for each server. And we have 58 servers (yes you might not need DE, FR mods for the SA Servers…it is just a rough estimation of the numbers).
To make it simple again: just imagine the clicks you’d have to do to report someone. Takes just a few seconds. For manual bans, issued by a GM, I’d argue that there are 2 scenarios:
- if monitoring identifies a bot > the GM simply issues the ban > why doesn’t automated monitoring do it in the first place? Saves time, we don’t need a GM for that, but might have more false positives
- GM identifies a bot either via notification from monitoring or by looking at the game > GM needs to do a few clicks like we as players do > it takes some time
I do think that having GMs in chat would be a great idea, don’t get me wrong. But not as a real counter measure for banning bots.
Of course a GM should be able to issue bans if a character/account is identified as using illegal RMT, using bots, being a gold seller. But I’d see them as a second step e.g. when players report an account, the GM checks the report and then issues a ban. And I’d assume this is already happening, the people doing this are simply not active in the game itself, thus I wouldn’t call them GMs.
Now again simply imagine how often people are reporting bots/gold sellers. Every report gets in a ticket queue that someone needs to work through…again this takes time.
edit:
I’m also not getting why AGS/SG are doing some things like they do them. Because on the one hand they stated several times that they can identify many bots automatically. Yet they are not directly banning them, but always have these large ban waves. It is like “we banned 1mio accounts, now let’s wait 3 or 4 weeks so that we can ban 1mio again…”. Almost as if it looks better for marketing…
I also do not agree with several of the measures they have taken and are reluctant to make bigger changes to the systems the bots/gold sellers are abusing (e.g. the market and the flow of the money). But well…that’s how it is
I’d just argue, that you don’t need a GM to identify the situation in some cities for example. Everyone knows how bad it sometimes is. And posting a screenshot with many bots on one spot is kinda yesterdays news
). You just cant look at the rat infestation sans the cat and say a cat wouldn’t work, when we’ve seen cats work everywhere else ya know?