[Spoke]

It takes 1 skilled knowledgeable player to write a good bot/script that functions as it is supposed to.

It takes 1 minute for said player to upload the script file.

It takes 1 minute - 1 day for the dumbest internet user/player to follow the steps to install the above mentioned script/bot.

Bots and intelligence are not correlated. The best working bots or programs may very well belong to the best players in an specific area, but a bot is a piece of code that anybody can install and use (you could argue: thus leveling the playing field *ugg*).

In any case, I tend to agree with an approach that renders the motivations to bot low. You can focus your game in the interactive way, make something that is hard to script (unpredictability etc). Another approach is to have heavy policing, which requires a huge investment of man-hours just to check if people are typing their commands or if it is their computer doing so.

At the end, anything I have seen in a MUD can be botted. Generally this is true because there is no much room for dynamic variability in the games I have seen, nor do I know exactly how you would accomplish the required variability. Also, games that have an strict set of rules regarding anything (bots included), tend to have a very clear explanation of the way their game works. The game is consistent and as such you can program an interface to react to its environment.

As games become more complex, the value of writing a piece of code to assist your playing will increase without necessarily diminishing the amount of enjoyment you can draw from playing.

For instance. Take GodWarsII, it has an awesome combat interface, you have hundreds of different options to attack every other second, you need to be careful with your stamina so that you do not tire up, you need to coordinate your many locations with which you can attack/defend/cast. Given the fluid combat the game has, you can either type each two-letter command during a fight, so that you maximize your flexibility to react or ... you try to trigger alarms for the different things that may go sour during the fight and automate a reaction to those specific things. You may also write aliases for commonly used sequences of combat too, and soon, you are typing: #alias fbb ls;ls;lp to make your life easier (this is a poor example of the type of alias one would want to use, but take it as a general dummy one)

So, the richer in features and things you need to be aware of a game is, the more value there is in having your computer keep track of essential information and even on having the computer react in the critical times where you have to respond within a short time-frame.