Many people do whine about people botting, yet it is spreading across the hearthland in form of custom clients, auto-miners/diggers/farmers and etc. There are scripting API's are being posted that allow people to do their own bots as well. Meanwhile, some people are showing aggression towards this tendency and argument it with "you cannot have everything by 1 click". On the other hand, what is the sensible amount of clicks? Should we click for every single thing, or just every time when we make a decision (like in most games)? How much time should one spend on certain things? What is the range of activities one can enjoy every day within 2 hours of gameplay? Farming, for instance, consumes 2 hours straight for many people.
To dwell on it further, the highest player activity evolves around building new projects, rebuilding their places, making new set-ups and etc. I have seen villages that have almost quite to become alive once they were forced to move to the new location and rebuild their city. I have seen players carrying on playing just because they had ongoing long-term projects. Finally, the player activity becomes stale once he/she finishes building and faces the daily hafen routine. Imho, if the devs cannot make/do not have enough time to implement something that would feed the player's interest with the current set-up, the best thing would be to automize the most routine activities even more so. Make it so that building the city, expanding the civilisation, creating proper layouts, doing things that require you to go outside consume most of the time that player spends in the game. For instance, while your alt-character is auto-harvesting the fields and making the stockpiles, you could actually spend that time foraging, trading, hunting, exploring and etc. Or just watching a movie. The point is that making such changes will not give an advantage to the people with botting clients, but will lower the numbers of people that leave due to the boringness of the daily routine. If the game doesn't challenge you intellectually and socially, you will most likely loose the motivation to do anything in general.
Do not bother posting your reasons why botting is bad. It's been told over and over. This thread is to discuss how would further automatization of actions affect the gameplay, what should be automized, what kind of solutions could be made and etc.