Botting is Ruining the Trading Site

The current state of the endgame economy will drive a lot of players away once they start getting involved. Any sort of a good or fair deal is immediately bought by a Chinese/Russian bot and marked up 200-1000% value at a minimum. I'm sure many of you have seen this when you post an item below market value and you get a spam of 60+ messages to the point where you're almost forced to log out temporarily.

Some bot detection to see if certain accounts are consistently sending out messages the first 2-3 seconds an item gets posted and also if they are sending out dozens of messages faster then an actual human can would go a long way towards combatting this issue. Also, some form of whisper protection to where if you post an item and someone whispers you to purchase it then there's a 15-30 second delay before someone else can message that person so you don't have these spam bidding wars happening on items all the time. People now have some form of add-on where they post an item low intentionally and it auto messages back stating you can bid and the current price.

On top of that, because their is no instant buyout option available, a lot of items don't get sold due to the seller being busy on a boss/breach/delirium. So even though both parties want this transaction to happen, it doesn't because the price tag does not exceed the inconvenience of exiting to complete the trade.

Overall, the trading market should be a cool and exciting place to gain some currency and acquire upgrades for your character, but bots are making both of those objectives quite soul-crushing at the moment. Getting these upgrades on the trading site feels very rewarding, but for certain items it's become very shady and making the endgame more of a grind then I believe was intended. Chase items will always be expensive and that makes sense, but waystones/precursor tablets/jewels and other items you may need frequently being a hassle to acquire is not very fun to experience.

Don't stress about it, EA isn't going to be a thing, it's a beta test, once the game releases it's going to be forgotten even if you can log into it and play old EA characters nothing else will be added to it, no new leagues, no new characters and nothing will carry over to the base game (standard/HC)

Also, they do ban bots a fair bit, they could (on PoE1) restrict drops to basically nothing so they can examine the bot accounts, trace what goes where, what would make the easy to detect .

They've already been banning people in PoE2 and there will be some big ban waves coming.