[KaVir]

Here's an example from the thread I linked to earlier:

"Well an extreme example would be my original Gladiator Pits codebase. Combat is fully automated, so there would be nothing for the bot to do during the fight. There's no character advancement, so the bot couldn't improve you if left running overnight. And fights are always one vs one, so there'd be no benefit in running multiple bots."

There really is nothing you can bot, at least from a competitive/gameplay perspective. Now I'm certainly not saying other people should implement such a solution (I only created it that way because I was limited to 16K of source code), but the point is that there are solutions. It's not a question of whether it's possible to render botting worthless (because it is), but whether you're willing to pay the price in terms of limiting your game design (which, for the record, I'm not - but that's beside the point).

The situation isn't black and white though. Here's a less extreme example from the same thread:

"My Last City mud (long since shut down) had primarily automated combat, with each player having their own dice pool. Your dice pool would gradually refill, and you could configure where the dice were allocated (attack, parry or dodge) and customise other things (such as replacing your parry with an off-hand attack). Once you had enough dice to attack (and you could configure that amount as well) you'd attack. You still had interactive commands like "kick", but they would spend your available attack dice, so it wasn't an extra attack, it leeched off your normal attack.

Other speed-critical things in Last City were also configurable. For example Celerity (supernatural speed) allowed you to configure dodge (if someone tried to attack you, you'd automatically dodge aside, and combat wouldn't be initiated) or attack (if someone tried to attack you, you'd hit them first). In terms of character advancement, you only earned 1 exp for each of the first 100 mobs you killed, after that killing gave you no further exp - you only earned it for logging on and playing for an hour, and even that dimished over time."

Not really much you can bot there. A combat bot isn't going to give you any real benefit, as your tactics are all configured in advance. You could bot for exp, but that would only take a couple of hours at most and then you'd have hit your limit. The only real advantage I can think of would be creating an army of bot alts (which could also be addressed in a number of ways).