The Problems with Blade & Soul Bots

The main problem with bots which aren't being blatantly obvious by outright hacking, completely stationary, follow each other in a train, all look identical, perform actions in sync, or have nonsense gibberish as names, is they can be rather difficult to detect reliably on sight alone.

Even for those MMOs which have full-time GM teams, the practice of sending a /tell asking a dynamic question you wouldn't be able to automate, and tossing out a ban if a reply doesn't come soon enough or otherwise the suspected bot doesn't stop their current actions, would usually only catch the AFK bots from people who go to sleep or leave the house while their bot is running.

The other type of modern bot which performs actions at human-like random intervals and sounds an alert for the owner (who can be at the keyboard with Blade & Soul Gold) upon receiving any communications and even have programmed databases of answers to common questions, are pretty much undetectable from dedicated hard-core players who like to grind or farm something for hours on end and be good at it. Nowadays I wouldn't even be surprised if people could use their cellphones to remote control bots to pass the human test to avoid bans. It's quickly become a lost cause to combat these sorts of undercover solo bots which are designed not to get caught, without getting normal players caught up as well, so it's best to just ignore them unless their actions become abusive. The most common way these types of bots are ultimately caught is in the rare cases players somehow figure out how to trigger a bug in the bot script to make it do something unexpected or enter a loop.

As long as NCSoft West bans the blatantly obvious bots regularly, and make an attempt at confirming AFK bots which receive many player reports, I'd say they would be doing a good job. Tossing out temp bans and/or rollbacks for bots and humans alike which blatantly exploit unintended game bugs introduced in patches, I'd say is okay as well. What they shouldn't do is go insane and start indiscriminately banning bots and humans alike based on player reports alone without any attempt to confirm, or else trolls would ultimately win.

The reason I stopped playing on the TW server of BnS was because the minute I logged on in any of the areas, I get greeted with dozens of bots running in a single file, teleporting and zapping across the ground.

It DESTROYED the game immersion and made me feel like I was playing the game offline with Blade And Soul Items, it wasn't a multiplayer game anymore and socially it became downright rubbish. There's a reason we can't get the best items/gear in a short amount of time, it's so we can put EFFORT into getting the mentioned things and be rewarded for doing so. Getting the best items/gear by having a program do it for them? Nah sorry but that's just lame.