Preface: This is a pretty simplistic solution, but sometimes simple is better. I also understand botting goes deeper than just gold selling, chat spamming, and market manipulation. Combating bot accounts is like a game of whack-a-mole that loops forever (especially in a free to play game).
This is merely a suggestion to help clean up chat spam, which for me, is the most immersion breaking thing happening in the game.
Solution(s):
-Chat mods with the power to quick ban accounts. After reporting probably literally hundreds of chat spamming gold bots at this point, I had a thought, why am I reporting and not just quick banning. Why can’t I sit in the middle of any major city with a giant ‘Ban Hammer’ weapon skin and enact swift justice upon these computerized accounts.
Obviously this is resource heavy, because you need physical people moderating chat. But I think even with just a few trusted mods in every server, there would be swift justice handed out regularly.
This would also be coupled with whatever behind the scenes (AI?) systems are in place and might even help it by weighing the mods’ inputs heavier.
-Putting a chat timer/character limit on specifically Area chat until roster/gear/player level or a certain story arch is finished.
-Or even adding an additional layer to Area Chat that is exclusive to some subset of people. This can be anything from hours played, to opting in to additional account verification. Think subscriber only twitch chats.
Botters life line is to make money, cut this off and suddenly it isn’t as lucrative, and suddenly we have less bots. At least that’s the way I see it.
There are plenty of ways to go about this, but it really does feel like relentlessly reporting these chat spams is not really doing anything. It’s still early, I know, and all reporting is helpful. It’s just not swift enough, especially when its seemingly at its peak right now.
TL;DR
Chat mods + basic anti chat spam features.
Think twitch chats with >100k viewers in slow mode + follower/subscriber only mode.
Thanks for reading, and have a great day!