The botting problem is seemingly getting worse. I didn't encounter that many on my first character, but my second go around is literally plagued with bot encounters. Every single public dungeon I have set foot in has 5 to 10 bots camping the boss spawn point. They are usually templars with two handed swords still in the tutorial rags, all named some variation of a keyboard faceroll. They are making it so that I dread going into public dungeons (something I looked forward to on my first character) and trying to battle these scum for enough damage on the boss to count for completion and a shot at whatever goodies they are holding.

These people need to be stopped. This is clearly their source of gold income to be sold for cash or there would not be so many of them doing this; stopping them from doing this will damage their main gold source.

You have announced you plan on doing something about boss looting, but this is going the complete other direction. You would be punishing legitimate players repeat-killing a boss to get their blue item. This is and will always be a staple of the MMO genre; farming bosses for items is what people do. The ONLY way to do this fairly is to take the farming out of the equation.

Some ideas for combating the bot problem:

* 1) Public Dungeon Boss Chests - at the end of the dungeon/delve there should be a chest, instanced (just like the treasure map chests) to the player and lootable ONE time only. Move the XP yield from the dungeon boss to trigger when opening the chest (like lockpicking does), move the bosses loot table to the chest with a guaranteed blue or purple boss unique reward. No one wants to stand around killing the same boss over and over again for their item, but we do it anyway. Take the time wasting out of the equation and just give each player a character-bound reward item as the chest will only be a one time occurrence. This prevents the bots from farming bosses for items and xp, while not overly penalizing legitimate players and their ability to obtain dungeon loot and dungeon/delve completion. I suggest not attaching the chest to the boss kill as this could still be seen as a source of griefing, but rather to the achievement trigger one gets from completing the dungeon/delve.
I personally feel that this is the best solution, but will list alternatives anyway.

2) HP inflation, dungeon participation tuning - tune dungeon bosses to have more HP based on how many players are nearby or in the instance. This does nothing to combat the bots, but gives legitimate players a chance to register a kill.

3) Instanced dungeons - if group-only or solo instancing is too resource heavy, instances with no more than 5 players could suffice. This greatly reduces the number of players competing for boss kills. Obviously this is only a bandaid for legitimate players and does nothing to combat the botting.

4) Flag all character names with "faceroll" type names for review/deletion. xxddg, aooii, ffxds, I've seen these types of names on almost every single bot. This will probably be the BEST method to identify botting accounts.

5) ban ip's, not accounts, limit number of accounts per IP - I realize some legitimate players have multiple accounts, but the bots are multi-boxing several accounts, most likely from the same computer and therefore from the same IP. Limit the number of concurrent connections from the same IP to 1 or 2. Also, banning accounts is simply delaying them. They create another and are right back in. The IP address should be blocked instead, thus preventing anyone from that address from creating more accounts. This will greatly impact their ability to operate as it is more difficult to change an IP address.

6) In-game moderators - funnel botting reports to in-game moderators instead of through the ticketing system. In-game moderators can visibly see the botting going on and immediately ban the offenders as opposed to what must be thousands of tickets reporting the same accounts. It is quite apparent who is a bot and who isn't in these public dungeons. It will take in-game moderators less than a minute to identify these for what they are as opposed to sifting through tickets.

That's all I have for now. Hopefully you all have already thought about some of this and are on it. If not, please, please use any or all of these.

The botting is killing the enjoyment for a LOT of people, myself included.