you act as if bots are a monopoly colluding. majority are individuals and competing to sell their product.
After collecting lotus myself, i had not seen a single bot competing with me. I had gold sellers from asia competing sure, but they were manually playing.
Every single spot on the map is picked dry of everything. hard to even find dreamfoil or silversage.
Swiping is indeed an issue, but it would occur with or without bots. I boosted 10 characters to level 35, and along the way had multiple boosters ask me to join discord then ask if i want to buy gold. Thats how most of them are making money for a living in asia.
So the issue right now that blizzard needs to tackle, is swiping. Average joe is going to work 9-5, putting zero effort farming materials in game, swiping his credit card and purchasing those materials making it hard to compete for players who do not swipe.
Swiping Swiping Swiping. Simple As That. And no, the bots are not forcing people to swipe, on their own, bots are a deflationary force.