So what you are saying is you are not necessarily going to stop buts but try to find a way to make their purposes obsolete or greatly underpowered in comparison to what they are now. I can understand if this is the case and honestly don't blame you for taking this route. I do blame you for taking this long to do it. I was one of the latter people to start botting. I was so far behind on the server I decided to pick up the bot that it took me almost 3 months to catch up to the big guys. I just don't get how you can take 4 years to fix this, especially now that bots are in such widespread use that most people have become accustomed to them and even the players like me who were strongly against them at first see their benefits and addition to the game.
I am at this state with Evony. I played it for over 2 years legit without bots or alts. I was getting tired of the game. It served its purpose to me. I still love it but just did not have the time to play competitively. It was all good when i was in college and only had to commit to 15 hours a week of class and the rest of the time I was either on the computer studying or on the campus with 100 computer labs at my disposal 24 hours a day to check in. Once I got out in the workforce that quickly stopped. So for me my Evony days were at an end. I decided to try out the bot and it allowed me to continue playing a game i had a lot of passion for. It was the best of both worlds.
Bots back in that day were a lot less complex than today. They farmed and did the grunt work for you, and although a lot of the features that are around today were technically around back then, it was not as widespread knowledge so they were basically used for farming, building NPCs, medal farming and building troops. Today the bots do everything. You can start an account, plug a bot on it and take it straight to the top 10 without ever having to log in and barely spending a dime. Trust me I have done it with just 30$ spent multiple times lol. Now saying that I can also say that for almost 5 years I have had a passion for the game and have spent much more than that on servers I really delve into.
My suggestion is this. Take out the worst part of Evony an bots and meet in the middle. Part of the reason your retention rate has been so great in age 1 is bots. I was getting tired of farming after 6 months. I did it for 2 years before caving. Not everyone will be that persistent in a game like this. Create an interface that interacts with evony, and is programmable by players. However take out the defending. Crack down on the 3rd party bots and the alts and make the game fair for everyone without the time constraint. If you do this it truly will be an equal battlefield for all and it wont jeopardize your player base and will most likely not effect your profit margins as much as killing bots off altogether. Bots were great when they were used just to do the grunt work while you work/sleep/play. They kinda suck now that they can be programmed to literally play the game start to finish for you.



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