I wonder if Blizzard took the step for gethering people to focus on bot bans manually. Thought it would be a big step for them as in it's huge costs, space etc for blizzard. /foliohatoff
As with any decision that gets made at a company of ActiBlizz's size, it all comes down to cost/benefit analysis. Assume that they bring on 50 extra people (huge hire, but what would be needed to make a dent) to combat bots, assume these guys make US 17$/hour (very conservative), that's 1.8 M dollars in straight labor per year, not including workman's comp/unemployment insurance/ benefits etc (closer to 2.5 mil after all that). Now, how much would they stand to gain from sales done by manual players in a market that is less saturated/inflated from botters (also revenue completely lost via 3rd party sales, done predominantly by botters)? Hard to say, but I think fairly negligible as A) the damage is done and B) the market will inflate/items lose value anyway .
Another factor is to assume that each new employee bans 3 accounts per day (conservative). Assume 60% of these bot accounts banned rebuys a copy, that is 1.6 million revenue recovered+profits gained from a less inflated market. So from a simple, completely hypothetical, unfounded cost benefit analysis we have
Cost: -2.5 Mil
Benefit: 1.6 Mil + unknown gain from AH sales
So basically a market with fewer botters needs to add .9 mil to revenue to make the new hires worth it, with additional value derived from good PR that Blizz is "*****ing down" on botters.
This is all totally fictional but Blizz definitely runs these numbers. In my opinion there would not be clear profits from doing this, and there is a lot of ambiguity that even a very experienced economist couldn't get through in terms of potential gain, so my guess would be they would just invest more in warden, pattern detection, and other software that can be automated and ban players who fit the bill with 98% confidence.
TLDR: probably not, maybe, cat and mouse continues