No worries, I don´t usually take things personally unless that was the obvious intent
And to a certain extent I agree… But after 30 years developing games myself, from 3d shooters to competing RPGS to doing backend for some mobile games, Ifeel I can safely say that botting is unfortunately a much more complex issue than most “outsiders” assume it to be
The first bots 20+ years ago were easy to detect and combat…
for ex. (this varies from game to game and is purely to illustrate the concept of the cat+mouse game it has long since become) they walked in a straight line from spawn, a so you put a rock in their way, and ban any account that was stuck on that rock.
Wave 2 then includes the ablity to jump over that rock. so you make a bigger rock, and ban anyone stuck on it.
Wave 3 then includes dynamic pathing, the ablity to go around obstacles, and it can stil jump… so you add a wall, and ban anyone stuck on it by not using the ladder
Wave 4 is able to climb that ladder, and still jump, and still go around obstacles…
And so on and so forth, to the point where we now have bots that are fully capable of clearing entire dungeons without human interaction, dragonriding, and in general actually playing the game from a purely mechanical standpoint, in many cases better than some players can. And that’s when it starts to grow hair…
They’re still clearly not human when you inspect them directly, but the more advanced the bots get, which happens every time you ban one of them for obviously non-human behavour, the routines behind that behaviour get changed (this is the primary reason most games operate with banwaves, so that the bot coders don´t immediately know what it was that got them caught but have to figure out which of 5,6,7,20 things it might have been).
And the more advanced the bots get, the less useful algorithms actually become in their detection, because the closer they mimic actual players, the more false positives will get returned, and the more innocent players will wind up getting wrongfully banned for nothing more than for example having autowalk on and going afk to grab a cup of coffee, winding up walking against a wall for 5 minutes.
And to prevent all of those false positives from decimating your playerbase with autobans requires human oversight and inspection on a case by case basis, which in turn requires manpower. and teh more advanced the bots get, again teh more false positives you´ll get, ergo the more people you need to sift out the actual hits from the players
The big irony here is that teh more bots you ban for being non human, and the less time you allow them to be around, the faster their behavior starts to resemble that of actual humans. To the point it already reaced a few xyears ago where I dare postulate that if somebody were to for ex sign up for timewalking ini as a tank and turn their botting software on, the vast majority of players today would not actually be able to tell a difference, except that they´re not getting flamed by the tank after every pull for being scrubs.
And in fact many bots today, if you whisper them for for ex. with “Are you a bot?”, will either straight up report you together with the rest of the army, or even more insidously whisper you back with something along the lines of “Eh, no. Why would you even think that? Are you toxic?” … Thereby gaslighting players onto thinking they´re themselves the bad actor
And that´s the real problem… the obvoius bots, the Boomkins running in circles spamming starfall, or the herbing and mining bots flying in right angles, have not been the actually dangerous ones for quite some time now.