Due to a recent thread that brought this issue to the spotlight, id like to throw my thoughts into this never-ending debate.
I dont see bots as a problem to be honest, i dont use them in Haven personally, but i see why some people do. Dedicating hours of your day to simply feed your cows is very frustrating, and some people who enjoy Haven for other aspects simply dont have that much time to spare. You can argue that people who dont have that much time shouldn't play Haven, but thats a whole different argument.
Ill bring to the table an example of Devs vs Botters, Runescape. Jagex has been fighting bots for years now, they have a huge dev team with its own department dedicated to combat botting, and they STILL haven't found a cure-all solution. Most of the major botting groups have been locked down and their users banned within hours of using the scripts, but there are still some really advanced bots who use some tricky methods to hide themselves and prevent reverse engineering, and even today i still see bots with 90+ level in a skill, thats equivalent to days/weeks worth of botting, and they continue to bot daily with no bans.
The best way to combat bots isnt wasting Dev time trying to find a way to detect and counter them, we see above that its a waste of time and will never be fully resolved, Its to find a reasonable in-game solution to what these bots are trying to accomplish, so people have less incentive to bot in the first place.. automation.
Balanced automation of very repetitive tasks such as farming would be the best course of action, set a high threshold to achieve that goal, maybe some crude form of Combine, like a cross between a wagon and plow. You hitch 2 bulls to it and pull it across your fields and it harvests rows at a time. Maybe a more advanced version that requires steel and other top tier mats to build that works a bit faster, and maybe even replants them.
If ingame automation isnt a route J&L want to go, then dont bother trying to combat bots, you'll end up sinking way to many hours into a tug-of-war that will never end.
Let the discussion begin. And please, keep the argument civil.