Perhaps the bot issue in Elder Scrolls Online is not being viewed in the right light. I bet there is a way that will not only contain the bot threat to ESO but also make it a joyful and entertaining experience for both players and gamemasters alike.

I am a creature of considerable talent when it comes to manipulating the minds of the weak willed and the desperate. I'm almost as good at touting my own horn as I am causing others to waddle into their own demise, but, enough about me and my gloriously twisted mind, let's talk about what we can do to make goldfarmers have a very, very bad time and yet still allow us to glean some enjoyment out of their suffering. I'm also pretty good at run on sentences too, but I digress.

I think the first problem is that bots are being banned.

Now, hear me out- You can ban them, sure, and they're gone, for a little while. They get to start anew. But- now, hold on- you can also make them suffer. Clearly, banning them is an expected event on their part. It's an inconvenience, but clearly one that they counter on a regular basis. Perhaps the best way to kill this hydra is not to cut off heads where two will grow, but to drown it in mud, reduce it's efficiency in creative ways. All you have to do is reduce their gold farming abilities to the point in which they still cling to their desperate addled accounts but not to the point in which they decide to make new accounts.

This will likely require a fair amount of balance and a whole lot of deception. I will need to invoke Molag Bal for the scheming, Boethiah for deception, Clavicus Vile for wishes too good to be true, Malacath for the cursing, Mephala for the networking, and Sheogorath because who doesn't love a little chaos thrown in?

My suggestions require you to still locate and mark the bots, but for torment, not destruction. They must be distinguished from authentic players so that your actual consumer base is not also afflicted by the curses placed upon the parasites. There must also be no indication that they are marked for torment in order to maintain the deception. Below are some simple ways to inflict misery on these scumbags.

(In no particular order in regards to severity or hilarity)

1. Drone Limbo: Create a quarantine phase for known bots. Bots in this phase cannot phase out to other characters such as friends and guildmates, and they cannot send mail or contact players outside this phase in any shape or form. This phase appears that all is normal, and ripe with Jute, but it is in fact no different than Coldharbor, and will prevent actual players from experiencing the lag the presence of these bots generate.

2. The Illusion of Voice: If a marked player (or perhaps low level) leaves the first zones (not the islands, I mean more like Stonefalls, Glenumbra, and Auridon) and tries to talk in zone chat, no other players can see that message. BUT, the player in question sees the message in zone chat as if everything is normal. This means they will continue to spam, thinking their advertisement spam is working, but no one else will actually see it.

3. Punching Bags: Players marked as bots are flagged for FFA PvP. Any other player can kill them. There is no reward for killing them, other than satisfaction and maybe some twisted sense of fulfillment. It allows your customers to, say, vent some stress.

4. The Long Haul: If a player marked as a bot is killed, they're put on a 10 minute cooldown for ressing, whether from soulstone or at a wayshrine. Right now they res almost instantly because they're a low level, but add a 10 minute timer and I bet they'll wait to res instead of making a new account.

5. Digging Too Deep: If a marked player loots the same resource node 3 times in succession, it summons forth a hostile mob that looks just like nearby hostile mobs, a mimic, if you will, but it has a spammable AOE dmg aura, to ensure that all bots around a node will be killed. The monster has no loot and yields no experience and cannot be killed. Once the angry animal is out of combat, it despawns. This means that goldfarming bots will die over and over, and goldfarmers will not know what is going on until they are actually present to observe. It will cause the goldfarmers to have to reprogram bots to recycle through nodes, wasting valuable time.

6. Too Much Baggage: If a player is marked as a bot their inventory space and bank is wiped, and reduced to 1 slot each. This 1 slot inventory sized cannot be increased by vendors. Watch as bots slave back and forth with their 1 inventory slot.

7. The Curse of Gold: Give the Goldseller "cursed gold." This gold cannot be traded, and all gold the character earns becomes "cursed." Cursed gold cannot be traded or mailed or used to buy items. Goldfarmers will rack up piles of cursed gold and not be able to do anything with it, and will probably be hesitant to delete those characters because of the sheer amount of gold on them. By the time they've figured it out, hours to days will have been lost.

8. Vanishing Act: If a player marked as a goldfarmer or bot mails or trades an item, that item mysteriously vanishes. Countless items and gold farmed will be destroyed before they realize what's going on.

9. Loot of the Damned: Have the goldfarmer loot a random epic item with a random name and random stats. The item itself is an illusion and while it can be equipped and works as a basic item of it's type the listed stats are not real. If the character goes into combat while the item is in their inventory, they die instantly. The item cannot be traded. The item's name is random so the goldfarmers never learn which items are to be avoided and which one's aren't.

10. Better Yet, Just Kill Them: If a marked player loots any node more than 3 times, just kill them outright. Give it some sort of explosive animation for bonus points.

11. Play It Close to Home: Marked goldfarmer accounts are sent random tells and in game mails with ominous and superstitious phrases in Chinese.

12. The Counter Spam: Accounts who are found guilty of gold spam or trading gold and items to customers are mailed hundred of emails about spam. The name of these emails and the messages in them mimic the names and messages of other mail in their inbox. They are forced to search through each letter to get to the items they're looking for, burning up precious time.

13. Plenty of Fish: Whenever a marked account loots something, they are teleported out into the ocean where they are attacked by slaughterfish. The item itself is deleted.

14. Fear of Success: Whenever a marked account mails or trades gold or items, they might randomly get instantly banned. This means goldfarmers will never know when their next action will be their last, especially if there is no way to tell if their accounts are marked.

15. Scary Consumerism: Allow marked accounts to trade and mail items to players who buy gold. When those players receive the items they paid the goldfarmers for from a marked account, those items are deleted and the player receives mail in game from a gamemaster telling those players that you know what they did and if they try it again they will get banned. Since the players spent real money and risked their credit card like fools to buy from the goldfarmers, they lose out on that and as word gets around player will stop buying from goldfarming websites. You will need a way to distinguish an actual transaction as opposed to a goldfarmer mailing 100 random accounts worms and all of those accounts get penalized unfairly, but I'm sure you can figure that out.

16. Running Molasses: Reduce the movement speed of marked characters by an amount appropriate to their level, say, 10% to 75%, with the higher the character's level, the higher the penalty. Give no indication that their speed has been reduced. Watch as goldfarmers try and figure out at what level makes their bots no longer worthwhile. A month later, increase the penalty by 50% of the current penalty, and so on.

17. Fake Out: Marked bots looting resource nodes can no longer actually loot items, however, it still appears that they are looting items. The items they loot are deleted, but a false version of the item is still placed in their inventory.The item cannot be traded or mailed, but it can be deleted. Watch with glee as a goldfarmer checks his bot herd in the morning and thinks that all the thousands of Jute they farmed last night are good, but then when he can't do anything with them but delete them, he might just try to delete them and go for another all night grind session, with the same result.

18. Nerf Fight: Reduce the damage bots deal so that they only do 1% dmg to the health of any mob regardless of what ability they use or what items they have. Watch their grind trains slow down to a crawl as their automatic programming forces them to spam spam spam and yet not do very much. They now have to choose, do they reroll a new character and start all over, or do they continue to grind the 1%?

19. The Twitch Effect: All marked bots have their signals scrambled. When the character is given any input (such as left, right, attack, etc) that input is replaced by another entirely random input server side. Watch as bots run willy nilly all over Tamriel and goldfarmers scratch their heads as to why their 3rd party programs are not working. Likely they will try to dissect the bot programs first before figuring it out!

20. The Night Mother Cometh: (idea by @LadyDestiny) If all those bots are standing around there farming, we might as well put them to work. I've heard that you guys are working on Dark Brotherhood quests or the like, so why not have a daily that allows us to hunt down (via waypoint so they can't hide) and slay one active bot? Or more than one? Watch as players search Tamriel for those chosen by our beloved mother. The bots, of course, will have no idea that the Black Sacrament has been performed.

21. Terrain Furniture: Instead of banning bots, consider scripting them so that they are locked in gibbets hanging on either side of the road in certain areas of Coldharbor for all the desolate to see as they march into the cold dark. If the server senses that the player has moved (i.e. no clip or teleport hacks) that player is removed immediately back to that location, suspended in the air and trapped in a small metal box.

22. The Gold Plague: Marked bots are hit with a plague of gold. The gold is different than normal gold, but it appears to be the same. That gold is actually laced with code to track it. Anyone who is mailed more than 100 plagued gold has their own gold affected by the plague. Anyone with the gold plague cannot buy, sell, create, trade, mail or deconstruct items, or store them in their bank. This ensures that if goldfarmers trade or mail gold to customers (and those players accept), those customers are also affected by the gold plague, and they will be very confused and write tickets to you as to why they can't do anything. This means they will be reporting themselves directly to you. The downside is that if the goldfarmers learn about it they will trade and mail gold to innocent players in the attempt to cause confusion, but it will work for a while. Actual players with plagued gold will need to be given serious consideration to see if they were trying to buy gold or victim of goldfarmer confusion.

Goldfarmers are an opportunity, if treated right- well, okay, if treated very, very poorly.

Excelsior,
-Sars

P.S. If anyone else has any imaginative and terrible tricks we pull on these goldfarmers, by all means, share.