so, your solution is to make it easy for PvP by creating a new environment where bots couldn’t survive and leave PvE unchanged? lol, you’re missing the point; selfish.
The root cause needs to be solved: 1) making the system efficient for ALL players (regardless of flag) and 2) getting rid of bots.
it is sad that bots take so long to get banned and then they can return quickly.
the ban has to be more effective to discourage their use. ban the entire license, not allowing another steam account to re-use the same license.
also, quickly action reports. many people (intentionally or unintentionally) report bots incorrectly, so it can’t be based on the number of reports.
AGS likely needs MODs playing the game (on each server) and validate reported bots.
the biggest impact of bots is to the players that actually want to gather. those that just want to buy mats from TP, like the bots because their prices are lower.
in the end, a balance needs to exist so that the multiple systems can co-exist efficiently (gather/sell/buy).
AGS likely doesn’t see the full impact of bots because the TP has items and they are somewhat well priced. they miss seeing that a human player on a populated server, wastes too much time trying to find a harvestable nodes.
PvP is not the answer; you’re just short-sighted.
Also, making these items BoP would solve the bot issue but it would create another big issue where you cannot buy or trade… This could work if you didn’t need to spend 10’s hours per week gathering the different items on top of playing whatever content you like… if a node would give a large number of resources and the gathering of different items would take an hour or two that would leave enough time to play.
this is why lots of people like the idea of making every node harvestable once per day; you have access to all nodes and that’s plenty. no need to mess with PvP/PvE.
if you have 20 hours a day to play, go play a different part of the game or do another activity; you don’t need to gather a million items in a day 
i can spend 8 hours gathering ori to only end up with ~500 ori ore/hour (without competition; normally half or less). this is a waste of my time as i’m left without time to play the game.
Let’s see what AGS does in April for the bots topic. Banning VMware was a short term solution that didn’t last. As long as players pay real money for gold, bots will find a way to exist.