Confirmed - cause found, patch not written yet.

Bots choose who answers by distance and a random roll only - they never look at what you actually typed, so your name means nothing to them.

Moving it out of OPEN so the list reflects reality: this one is pinned down to exact files and lines, so what is left is writing and testing the change, not working out what is wrong.

Fixed in c89b52ae.

Cause: when you typed in chat, the bot that answered was chosen purely by geometry and a dice roll - dressed, within 250px, has not answered in the last 15 seconds, lowest random score wins - and then stayed silent about half the time anyway. Nothing in that path ever looked at the bot's NAME. So typing 'hi MonoBee' was indistinguishable from typing 'hi': some random bystander answered sometimes, and MonoBee itself usually said nothing.

Fix: a name in your line is checked first now. The text is normalised down to letters and digits, so 'hi mono bee' and 'MonoBee!' both land, and it is matched against a few forms of each handle - the name itself, digits stripped, a leading 'x' dropped, a trailing region tag dropped.

It deliberately does NOT split CamelCase: that would leave stems like 'snail', 'blade', 'arrow' and 'storm', which fire on ordinary market chatter. Checked across all 150 handles against all 1,136 authored lines, the conservative version has zero false matches and every bot still answers to its own name.

A bot called by name skips the distance and probability gates - those exist to keep background chatter sparse, not to ignore someone talking to you. Where two handles both match (xMushCat and MushCat92 are one of 15 such pairs) the tie-break is stable, so every player sees the same bot answer.

Retest: say a bot's name in chat, including with odd capitalisation or a space in the middle.