First off, I wanna say I’m someone who played the MMO Mabinogi for a long time. So I want to borrow an idea they used for a while- the time bomb. You could buy it for cheap in general shops, and use it on players and it would make them solve a quick puzzle or something. It doesn’t matter what it makes the player do, it could be a fun minigame to make it less annoying. Point is, if the player failed to solve it, they’d be dc’d. So in the case of a bot, the bot wouldn’t be programmed to solve a puzzle, and they’d be dc’d because of it, while a regular player could solve it with ease and go on with their day. You would probably want a limit on it, like a user can’t be hit with a timebomb if they have been in the past 15-30 minutes, that way it wouldn’t be abused (abuse is likely why it was removed from mabinogi).
Second idea, afk timeouts unless you have a service open (blacksmithing etc). This one would help with bots that only exist to flood the chat with those ads we all know and hate.
Third, camping penalties, applying both to money drops and exp gains. This would probably only kick in after 10-15 minutes since this is a grindy game. But hopefully it’d help.
Anyone else have ideas?