We all know it, you know it for sure ANet. We know where your botters are coming from. They come from China, they come from Japan, they come from Vietnam and they DEFINITELY come from the Philippines. Philippines being your likely biggest threat as far as botters goes.
I suggest a massive IP ban on the entire region. I know this will hurt you ANet, in your pocket, keep listening, I have a solution to that too.
You ban the entire region as they are not responsible gamers. If you still feel the need to provide support to them in the form of your game, I suggest you begin a new isolated server there JUST for them and only for them.
This will allow us to go unhindered by the effects of their irresponsible gaming, inflicted upon us by them AND you ANet. Opening up servers just for them, but completely segregating them from our servers will keep your pocket happy and the majority of your customers happy.
Let them bot all they want, seriously. It is becoming obvious that it cannot be stopped or even culled, not in a reasonable amount of time, say, before it gets out of hand, which clearly, it already is. But…let them bot segregated and off by themselves. Let them ruin their own economy, let them hack their own version of the game and ruin it just for themselves.
I heard of a game recently, ‘Max Payne’ that is also doing something similar to this, any one caught hacking gets placed into the hackers server, never to return again.
There are several companies out there that employ this technique, most recently noticed by me was Perfect World Entertainment, who has long kept that region separate from others, I assume, for this very reason. They recently implemented this same exact fix to botters as you did. THE EXACT SAME THING IN EVERY DETAIL. Big difference though, they only did it to the Asian market for their game. No joke, they did not implement the anti-botting programming code for the western servers, the code is clearly there, but not active.
I strongly suggest this as a solution to the botting problem. It has been proven time and time again, they cannot be trusted to display honesty and integrity in the gaming community.
I am not saying you will not have problems still with botters here, there will always be botters and hackers, but if you go along with this idea and make it reality for yourself and for us, the problem will be much much smaller, on a scale that you CAN deal with. Instead of having thousands of reports, I suspect you will get hundreds and perhaps just on a couple people entire game wide.
By the way, the community was no more or less agitated by the coming anti-bot programming in Perfect World International. When the announcement came out the forums lit up like a Christmas tree, I even quit for a week until I found out they did not implement it. They were very quick to not allow that programming to be implemented.
I would strongly consider segregation if I were you. For tournament sake you might even still be able to hook it up for versus combat, PvP and WvWvW, provided you can stop them from hacking too(fat chance).