I think one way would be to disable pasting text into chat (or disable it all together). But then they'll probably use macro or something, but I'm pretty sure it's illegal so you can ban them like you do now (haven't read ToS but that's the case for most MMOs). Of course it won't get rid of every bots but a majority of them. Anyway why would you need to paste something in the chat, I don't think that's used a lot so it won't be missed by a lot of players. Another way would be to enter a captcha when you login for the first time, it would definitely slow them but I know some players don't like this.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to eradicate this threat that plagues every F2P MMOs. I do hope we get rid of them someday.

@Unie You might if you have space, but if not you can try the pso2 tweaker as it can download the game without downloading the 11gb on the store but with some additional steps, it seems to keep the game from uninstalling. I managed to keep the game from uninstalling by doing some powershell commands that links the game folder to another one, it looks like that works against this issue (at least for me). Sorry if that doesn't help much, I had to download the game twice because of this too, so I feel your pain. Hope you resolved this issue because I'm replying late. Edit: the tweaker can check missing files and download the rest if you know where the game is installed

That's the biggest problem, it seems it's caused by PSO2 being installed in another drive (e.g: D drive), it seems you have to install on C drive, which most people can't. The only workaround is (if you can't move it to C) to backup your pso_bin folder once it's fully downloaded and then replace when it fucks up. Yeah, that's it. If you have installed PSO2 in C drive, then it's another reason, main problem is Microsoft store.

I can't start the launcher (even though I could before and didn't start repair) and it shows a loading bar under its icon (can't start it, does nothing) .

While browsing its files in "D:/Program Files/ModifiableWindowsApps" I could see that it removed all files but a few dlls and data folder,

It also added a new folder (which wasn't here before for sure, maybe it showed after the whole game downloaded) name "win32_na" which is filling VERY SLOWLY (in two hours it wrote 2.75GB) and the size of win_32 also decreased from 69GB to 54GB. I could also note that my disk usage was higher than usual, thanks to a process "wsappx".

Think it might be related to ppl that experienced game being not startable after a reboot (could be bc they shut down their PCs while this was running), I noticed that all the downloaded files were moved to "D:/WindowsApps/MutableBackup" (all executables are here).

It's taking a lot of time, don't know why it is so slow to write, I hope I can play soon.

EDIT: Now it removed everything and the game is back to 11GB and freed up some space, still can't load game though. Thx Microsoft and your shitty store