The grid is nothing more than the game automatically planting your plants in rows for you. These rows/grid would either be based off your character, my preference, or based on the gardening area itself. With that said, this does absolutely nothing to help automation as it can also plant behind you and to the side of you as well. The only thing it is doing is ensuring the plants are spaced evenly instead of randomly placed with a high chance of bunching up. This allows the player to easily select their plants and take care of them. Once again, this would mostly do away with the need for the GUI excluding a couple of bugs.

I still argue that first phase planting, watering and fertilizing is absolutely the least of your concern with gardening botting. There is a threshold here. Everything before this threshold is so inefficient there really isn't any reliability or much to gain from it. Once you get past this threshold of actually knowing when to make more fertilizer, pathing to get more water, returning back to your spot... At that point it all becomes irrelevant as someone has to write a proper program to achieve this. Once software is written it can easily be changed to adapt to any new changes implemented. Before this threshold, there are simple limited macros which are dumb, crude and can not account for changes to game state. There is some amazing talent out there these days and a programmer can accomplish anything he wishes.

The main thing is making it hard enough that the simple things, which is accessible to the vast majority, like mouse/keyboard macros, can't take place and none of what I mentioned will allow that. Upper end of exploiters are a very small minority, which can still be devastating, but it is typically a waste of resources fighting them as they have the resources to counter anything you put into place. You tackle the majority, not the minority.

I believe they could probably achieve more, with little effort, by implementing a counter on picking plants, just like tracking the number of mobs killed. Anyone that achieves a certain amount over a time period gets flagged and investigated. Simple and sweet. If i have been online for 24 hours straight having picked 7200 cotton then perhaps that is a good sign to look into me and to watch me. Then you can see if what I am doing is in timed intervals, for example. Why design code to inconvenience players, or not make better changes to a game, when you can do simple things like the above instead? There are often simple and elegant solutions to be had.

My concern is people getting too paranoid that the legitimate players suffer in a futile attempt to stop a couple of hackers. I also don't want to see witch hunts start up from this paranoia like I have seen in other games. To clarify, nothing currently gives me the impression that is or would happen. Just like DRM technology that raises the price of the media and devices, Blu-Ray for example, inconveniences the customers and at the end of the day it gets hacked anyways while never accomplishing its goal.

alleryn, could you tell me what version of Windows you are using as well? I have your system specs beat and still have problems. Kur Tower I frequently have the spin issue I mentioned, for example, but there is also a ton of trash laying around in that dungeon. It is almost as if the game is loading new textures, or perhaps dumping textures too soon, or rendering things that shouldn't be, like items behind walls.