All dungeons should have minimum ilevel requirements?

[KageTokage]

Durability is a check against botting unfortunately./

Which doesn't actually work because bots can easily be scripted to repair their gear the moment they get a "low durability" warning.

[KisaiTenshi]

Which doesn't actually work because bots can easily be scripted to repair their gear the moment they get a "low durability" warning.

Not if they haven't leveled crafters. Like with THIS game, that is easily the way to neuter the bots efficiency.

This is not a serious suggestion because of how it would screw over legitimate players, but just think about it...

Remove all the repair NPC's, A L L of them. In other games, bots tend to just run endlessly even when their gear breaks because the bare-hand damage of whatever level they are at is more than enough to keep beating on monsters, and doesn't actually prevent the player from attacking with broken gear. If there were no repair NPC's, then the bots would be forced to keep buying gear, and that's where you stick them a second time by removing all NQ gear from the merchants, remove all NQ gear and Allagan metals from quests.

Then to bring it back a bit from horribly annoying, allow the retainers to repair certain gear for free if they are assigned a DoH job at the right level, all other gear gil costs for them to "go and find someone to repair it for you". Bots will not have the time to level DoH retainers by the time they are hopefully booted.

Like for all intents, the reason durability even exists, in any CRPG, is that it's something that originated in Ultima Underworld. It's existed in some shape before then, but UW actually had items like weapons, food, and doors degrade over time (you could attack wooden doors instead of finding keys.) That was by design because UW had fixed resources. Monsters once killed, didn't respawn, and neither did anything you threw away. MMORPG's have infinite resources, so durability has been just a way to get players to return to the city or hub instead of constantly trying to beat down a door for 24 hours straight. In freemium games they tend to be a way to soak the players for more money by adding item destruction as a risk if you don't pay (let me count the number of items Ferghus from Mabinogi destroyed something.) Gear durability wasn't even in Pen-and-paper RPG's until the 2000's.

Every MMORPG has it. But maybe we should consider why we still have it. Like all Ultima's had "food" as a resource, in a CRPG, but in Ultima 1-8 it was simply a check against the player, again mindlessly hammering on something for hours without returning to town. Food in Ultima 7, I believe actually gave buffs, and that found it's way into UO, and most games subsequently removed the need to eat, but kept the buffs from it. (Mabinogi, if you don't eat, your maximum stamina is lowered.)

Perhaps gear durability needs to evolve as well. You can repair it to 199% if you repair it yourself, but it doesn't really add anything. In fact on ARR's release, repair costs were more than double, and players were speed running dungeons to try and save costs.