I want to see HNM make a come back in ffxiv. It's absolutely one of the best things from ffxi to carry over. I don't want them to be popped with items, that really defeats a lot of the fun of finding them or camping them. I want to see them handled differently however then simply popping and the first one to hit it, claims it within a matter of seconds.

The way SE combated bots in XI was simply putting a 1-3s time interval when the HNM spawned, it was unclaimable. If you tried to claim before it became vulnerable, you were locked out from claiming for a few extra seconds (long enough that someone else would get the claim usually). Now any wise man could determine in order to win claims effectively against this countermeasure is to simply spread the times of your ls' claims over that 1-3s. This is exactly what players did, and what NASA mastered. Nothing was all that special about NASA, except that it divided the lock out time evenly between all the players connected and made it easier to configure an alliance as a whole. A ls that I may or may not have been in had one, and it worked wonderfully, however players with normal bots and players without bots could just as easily get lucky and claim at the right time. This made it somewhat fair, however it remained considerably flawed.

When wotg came out and we had sandworm and ixion, claim bots became almost obsolete in claiming them, except for one pretty decent measure. The bot could tell if the ID location of the monster changed, and it could sound the alarm to alert the LS the HNM was up in one of the zones. This method of having an extremely large pop zone across many zones was a decent countermeasure for botting, however there was still a program developed specifically to track the HNMs in the zone and was quite accurate in telling you when and which zone the HNM was in. So again in my eyes, I felt it was ultimately a failure as any sort of anti-botting measure.

I think the best way to counter botting and allow for HNMs in the game is simply making the HNM have a 15-30minute (or more) window of invulnerability. Such that when it spawns players can attempt to claim it, however if they guess wrong and the invulnerability isn't over-

A.) They simply get killed by an invulnerable HNM. and/or
B.) They are locked out from claiming for 5 min (or more).

The greatest power the bot has is it's speed and accuracy. When the HNM is invulnerable for only 1-3s then it's very easy to set the bots to claim at .8, 1.0, 1.2, 1.4 ... 2.8, 3.0 etc. However I don't see this being the case if the invulnerability is long enough. People can still use bots to claim, but they are on the same level playing field as players who are not using the bots.

This is just one idea and could probably use some tweaking, but I feel it's a step forward. I think the important part is to make the system in such a way that botting gives little to no advantage over regular play, because if there is an advantage to be had- players will exploit it. Sure we can say don't bot and curse players that do, but the reality is if the system wasn't designed so poorly and easily exploitable, then there simply wouldn't be a place for the bot in the first place.

TLDR: Increase the invulnerability from 1-3 seconds (in ffxi) to something considerably longer to combat the speed and accuracy of bots.

PS. >>> GIVE US HNM!