"Preparation" trick or botting?

[Vnolan]

Preparation (DoL skill) - Reveals the conditions for obtaining HQ items while gathering

I've been seeing some lvl 70 gatherers using the skill each time they access a node. If they had it activated from the previous node, they will deactivate it upon accessing the next node and vice versa.

Is there any advantage to doing this? It's probably botting, but could they be that careless to leave such an obvious tell in their routine?

[KageTokage]

It's not uncommon for bots to use needless fluff actions with the intent of making themselves look more legitimate or just because they're using a terrible program, though sometimes you run into silly things like DoL bots using stealth in zones where nothing can aggro them which just makes them more obvious.

If you ever have doubts about whether or not someone is botting, though, just watch how they behave after they mount up in flight-enabled zones. If they pause for a second, then jump in place before taking flight and do this constantly, then there's a 99.9% chance you're looking at a bot.

In any case, they don't care about leaving obvious tells in their routines because the STF isn't even looking at those physical tells to determine whether or not they're botting (Otherwise people would be getting banned a heck of lot more often then they do), They only seem to scan the data a player's client is sending the server for abnormalities then act from there because bots are able to do things beyond the scope of what a normal player is capable of if poorly programmed (Such as attempting to spam an action faster then is actually possible with the standard game client).