Quote Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi View Post
they would be pointless, they'd tweak and shift methods, they'd be faster than any game developer can reasonably be, and so the effort that went into patching the previous methods would be a wasted effort, plus each time you have to get more strict, you run into the risk of changing systems such that they start harming legitimate players. So it can be done... temporarily, and they'd be back overnight.
Exactly this. Star systems and fingers or such and so, one might say?

Measures designed to mitigate bots invariably fail to do the job for long, and leave inconveniences for the legitimate users - that the bots often do not even suffer from after that round of bans as the next time around, their operators account for the detection systems, while it is all too frequent for the legitimate player to either have to actively modify their gameplay around the detection rules.

Diablo II was full of it, botters would be able to farm day and night without incident while legitimate players that made the oh so terrible mistake of starting too many farm runs too quickly, or swapping characters too quickly, or or ... would get greeted with the fake "Realm Down" error that indicated they had been restricted from playing on that server for at least two hours (with the ban lengthening on every attempt to log in during it too, to a maximum of a couple of days!).

WoW has tried several "underground bot" mitigation systems of types similar to those being suggested; they quickly resulted in droves of irritated players as even trying to run around on uneven terrain (such as Highmountain in Legion) could easily cause a sudden disconnect (which I might note in WoW's case destroyed all your UI data for the session because that is only saved on a UI reload or a LOGOUT, and NOT a disconnect!). Or falling into certain holes (I remember one in Bastion in Shadowlands) would trip the hack detector and DC you; to make it worse when you logged back on you'd be hovering above the hole so you would immediately fall again and re-DC to the same enforcement - the character was unusable until you filed a stuck character support ticket (and there is a cooldown on that, so hope you don't hit a similar snag again ...).

See also "the fish sense something amiss" for an example in FFXIV that is especially maddening because the timer persists across logouts and is only reset by actually fishing elsewhere, so you can run into it pretty easily if you are focusing on specific fish ...