Exactly.
My title comes with a lengthy post, even if my post is skimmed it explains what discussion i want. I do not oppose permanently banning botters or punishing them traditionally i am merely pointing out that it's not enough and sometimes very stupid (See my examples on medivia and nostalrius, their anti-bot attempts are 100% ineffective against anyone with google and spare time)
A nice balance is key, i agree. My main concern with strict rules is the potential to inflict damage to legitimate players though, i believe that 1 single false ban is worse than any amount of damage botters can cause. I have personally been banned dozens of times from several games and ots for botting when i haven't been and every time i instantly quit.
My intention is to let players be competitive with only 2-3 hours playtime per day, i'm not sure how to implement this yet but even if someone bots all day, someone who isn't botting should be able to manually achieve the same through something that is not possible to bot. Something engaging and random.
I'd love to see an ape play, if we preconfigured the hotkeys im sure he could get a decent hunt
I do plan to make some things random and unpredictable, but finding a balance between 'hard to bot' and 'annoying for players' is going to be rough, but is where i think i can tackle the issue as a hardcore botter myself.
Not completely, no... but the worst case scenario here is my server is more fun to play, less people bot and no harm was done to regular players. So it's a win-win, either i make my server better with or without bots. I am perfectly happy to accept the fact my server will be botted irregardless of my actions, as is my whole point against people advocating for all these rules and enforcements strategies.
Albion Online is very competitive, almost as competitive as oldschool tibia. But it is rarely botted in the same manner and in the wider content area of the game there are almost no bots (possibly none as it's too risky, on death you lose all equipment and items you are carrying no exceptions). Besides the obvious protections they have, botting is discouraged through risk, to run a bot on Albion Online is suicide unless you do it in safe areas which are not very profitable at all and don't really impact the game. People do cheat in other ways though such as loot macros but the average player is never affected by botting, unlike tibia where the whole server is affected negatively. This would be where i look for inspiration on the risk aspect of discouraging botters. If i can increase the risk to go afk without harming a regular player too much, i think that would be a step in the right direction.