So do you guys want a random captcha thingy like eternal eden?
It randomly pops up while you playing and if you don't enter after like 2 minutes or
sumthing you get disconnected. Of course, there would be no more AFKing in kawaii headgear, or vending overnight, or alt-tabbing for 20 minutes trying to figure out a quest.
The root problem of botting is the community.
Don't buy from merchant botters and don't buy their zeny and other services.
Then something magical will happen...they will go away.
@Lord Vader-So stop QQing and make an effort on your end to make your server a better place to play. Start an initiative to identify legit players and buy from them. Oh noes..i don't wanna pay a reasonable price for blue herbs for my guild...well get over it. All the GM's can do is ban bots (and they are doing just that). It's up to players to make sure botters don't want to come back.
The problems you listed for the captcha thing are pretty significant... A lot of players already object to that system for exactly those reasons.
As for the community, part of the problem is, as stated by Oda earlier, I think, that a lot of these zeny seller customers are newer players. New players have no commitment to the community and stand to lose the least from breaking the rules, and bot-farming makes it difficult to get any kind of financial base going, so it'd take quite a big push to stop this kind of self-perpetuating behavior. Rather than avoiding shops that appear to be bot-run (as I'm sure there is at least some crossover of bots and regular players between shops that do and do not appear to be farms), it might even be more effective to, say, implement a mentoring system to connect low level players with players who have some experience at the game. This would also be a good way to take emphasis off of the guides that are out there (I know the iRO wiki ones are quite good for the most part) and put more emphasis on player-to-player interaction, which, sadly, seems to be slowly evaporating from the game over the past decade or so.