Hi!
We all know hordes of bots generally destroy the quality of online games, and every MMO has them. However, once an MMO goes F2P, you often see a large influx of bots due to people only needing to spend 2 minutes making a new account for free, and they often run several gameclients botting at once. We’ve seen games being completely ruined by this, however!
By making a small mini-game that pops up every now and then when people have been grinding non-stop for longer than a couple of hours or so, you would make it significantly more difficult for people to run botted characters in the game. A minigame such as this, presented by a cute npc who gives a reward every time you succeed so that regular players would find it pleasant as well, would certainly give botters a real problem.
You could also make it so that the game client ‘flags’ a character who doesn’t respond when the minigame pops up, but rather just stands still not doing anything or failing the minigame repeatedly. This flag would of course be invisible to normal players, but would appear on a list for GM’s, so that they can investigate the person to see if it’s a live player or a bot, and then act accordingly.
We all know botting is a problem and makes a lot of people quit and look for different games where they can feel more secure that there aren’t too many cheaters, and I feel this suggestion will not only be beneficial for the players, but will also make your job a lot easier by bots being automatically reported to you by the minigame.
Thank you for taking the time to read this suggestion. =)