Quote Originally Posted by Angelhearth View Post
There is a much easier way to get ridd of the market bots, give everyone the same opportunities as the market bots. As to the harvesting bots, you need to put in place programs that will detect repetitiveness, make all node spawns totally random, get the program to ask the suspected bot a question and if it isn't answered within a few seconds, ban the account, the whole damned account, not the character. You could also start with banning the gil-buyers, not only the sellers. For the sellers it's a minor inconvenience, for the buyers it's their life. And lastly, you can start selling gil directly to the players, or change the way housing works, and make it into a quest to get a house.
Not sure about banning on one fail, I think the gathering bots could pretty easily be taken out by different random effects coming up that you had to use an ability to mitigate or you lose the node. Nothing crazy but injecting randomness in would massively deter the bots but players wouldn't really be effected. Give the benefit of additional gather or gives a bonus to GP or something by successfully hitting it but missing it just makes you lose the node. Or similar to your idea just have something that every X number of nodes theres a stacking percentage to bring up said question, failing the question gives a flag similar to missing a group queue. Once you accrue like 5 failures you are locked out of gathering for like 12-24 hours. It wouldn't ban but it would kill any ROI for the bots since that lockout would make them less effective at gathering than a player. Making the percentage stack like 0.1% each gather after x number and percentage is reset after a successful answer, but not on a failure, so queries more on people failing them or something would help keep it from coming up on actual players doing a grind.