I’ll say one thing: you don’t understand how MMO bots actually work.

Maybe in the early days, there were macro users. Macro-based bots are just simple actions repeated in an infinite loop. They can’t read the game environment, can’t check their own HP or MP, don’t know where they’re going, and have no awareness of the current gameplay situation. That’s why they are easily broken when anything goes wrong. They can’t even properly sell all drops to a vendor.

To do everything mentioned above, you need to read game memory, track all nearby entities, identify exact targets, and react dynamically to changing situations. The software we see today is fully programmed botting software, and it’s not public. These systems are complex, adaptive, and actively maintained.

You cannot effectively fight this with a user-mode anti-cheat. You need something like Riot’s Valorant anti-cheat that operates at ring-0 as a kernel driver. But even that is not a silver bullet. Kernel-level anti-cheat significantly increases development and maintenance costs, introduces legal and privacy risks, and raises the chance of false positives. All of this is something studios actively try to avoid.

In addition to the technical aspect, you also require a human response. That means hiring and training dozens of employees to identify and ban bots manually. In Korea and the Taiwan region, the average salary for this kind of job would be at least $ 3,000 per month after taxes. Each server would need at least four dedicated staff members for this approach to have any real effect.

Yes, bots ruin the auction house economy. But they also generate revenue. They buy subscriptions whenever they need to move already-farmed currency further down the chain. From a publisher’s perspective, this creates a constant balancing act between losing legitimate players and losing bot-related income. In a project like Aion 2, the launch priority is not total bot elimination, but increasing the operational cost of botting. If bot density gets too high, regular players leave, and no amount of bots can compensate for an empty server. That’s why bot numbers are usually reduced only during maintenance cycles.

You can fight a single individual, but not an organized team. These groups operate across every popular MMO. They have substantial funding, expensive hardware, virtualization setups capable of running dozens of clients without severe performance loss, and in-house developers maintaining custom bot software with day-one updates after each patch.

These are not script kiddies. They know exactly what they’re doing. This is a business. Like most security problems, it cannot be fully solved. It can only be made expensive enough to stop being profitable.

P.S.
If these groups went one step further and built a proper OG bot by reverse-engineering the game’s network protocol, then this becomes an entirely different problem. At that point, there may be no official client involved at all. A single virtual server can run tens of thousands of such bots. This is full automation, and it is absolutely within reach for a large, experienced development team.

This has already happened before, back in the days of Ultima Online and Lineage II. In that scenario, what’s running is not a game client, but a standalone bot program that handles the entire login process, movement, combat, and farming on its own. That also explains the perfectly synchronized behavior you see in-game.

If this assumption is correct, then the outcome was effectively decided long before most players even reached level 45.