There are other professions that wouldn’t require minigames like gemcrafting, enchanting and fishing.
And there are colorblind features would work. There are unfortunately some systems that are hard for people with nerve damage/motor dysfunction, and that is unfortunate.
Games are fine but it take time. Dang that sounds poetic ,sorry ,but i already have a quota a once per week .
This is not a silver bullet to end bots, it’s an unwarranted drag on the non-botters time. I wouldn’t even casually herb or mine if for each resource I had to do a mini-game.
In short, No. To this idea. It’s good people are thinking of ways to end the bots, but this is not the way. Do I have the answer? No, but I do like my fast single click herbs, ore and skinning.
You would actually get more per node, so the time would balance out, and over time, you would get better at critical successes giving you even more resources. Also, you can just fish or gemcraft or enchant or cook instead if you wanted something absolutely mindless.
Blizzard will never give us more, so we can do less. So yeah, it would be a 5 min mini game for 3 herbs. …or in recent history, it would be like helping a turtle make it to the water for herbs and ore. 
With me,imho,it just a relaxing part of the game by finish hard work to comes home and chill listening to music running around picking herbs or fishing before bed.So play a game for it is not the same.
You sound like that guy who suggests their workers be tracked day and night as to where they are by wearing an RFID tag on their neck.
You aren’t doing less, you are doing exactly the amount needed to be roughly the time it would take in the automatic system that is being exploited so bad by bots that you have to work for 5 hours to make just a sliver of gold.
Then with the dynamic difficulty and modifiers, there is a range of success that affects the harvest.
I’m not on board with the suggestion. Just don’t see it as either fun or a solution. I gave credit for people trying to come up with ideas…but insisting on a bad one isn’t going to convince me to give more. Sorry.
Star Trek Online did this with its crafting system originally. It was immersive and I don’t remember any complaints at the time. That said unless they also increased the amount returned per node most gatherers would complain about this, rightfully.
You can still fish.
Also, it will still be pretty low impact, put on some tunes and solve little puzzles. No problem. You don’t need to hit critical successes if you don’t want to. A lot of people relax with simple puzzles.
Idk, it feels better to for me being in the world herbing than playing a game for it on each herb or hub, my guess it’s the rhyme.
while I appreciate your goal and wish to eliminate bots OP, I am here to assure that bots can make it past all of those things - just not the crappy bots
the good bots can do captchas, they can do almost anything. I know this personally as I was part of an organization that used them for worldwide corporate business purposes. And they are only getting better every single year as they get cheaper and the AI algorithms get stronger. Most people are unaware of the advanced status of bots and AI available nowadays.
in a video game the downside of the stuff you are suggesting is major friction for regular players - something you want to avoid like the plague
when you make your game worse to chase away bots you have already failed miserably
the solution is what everyone already does, a cat and mouse detection game using algorithms, AI, and reporting to find and ban cheaters
this fight will never end, and bots will never stop as long as the game involves grinds that a real player would pay to avoid
all devs can do is stay on top of it and try to keep it as low as possible - some don’t spend enough resources and they are to blame but others spend plenty and you hit diminishing returns
Welp, I also enjoy that playstyle. However, for the vast majority of players who want to play the mechanics as intended, the system is broken. I’m sure we can still find a way to relax with it.
Also: bot chains break immersion v bad.
#1 solution… make mats bind on pickup and allow players to select a 3rd profession that’s dedicated to a farming profession (herbalism, skinning, or mining).
So with the raw mats being bop, this would make it so that only crafted items from those mats are sellable.
This would make professions relevant again overnight, and also potentially make botting not as profitable, as generally the crafted items aren’t worth as much as the mats consumed to make em, Especially if the market gets flooded with those crafted items due to players unable to sell the raw mats and instead have to craft everything, also the newest profession crafts should be locked behind leveling the profession (or timegated), so botters can’t just merely roll a new character and start making profits instantly… instead they would have to grind up every bot’s crafting profession levels to make the good stuff.
Lastly, make farming professions “miss” again or you don’t collect everything out of the node in one go (just like Classic), so for example for a mining node, you need to mine it more than once to get everything or whatever mechanic to make botting less efficient/profitable.
One problem with this idea … Bots have no problem (nor any time constraints) with doing more tedious activities. While I love the idea of making gathering more interesting, I think something like this would do more to punish the actual players than prevent botting.
You’d be surprised how good bots can be made to recognize simple patterns. A simple minigame would very much fall into that category.
That said, I think it’s on the right track; but overall, this isn’t a problem that’s going to be solved without heavy moderation from Blizzard.
Very few coders can work at this level. Just look up how to write code to sort numbers in C or write a basic synthesizer. Writing a bot to read and comprehend and react is so far beyond what the people who turn a profit on the low barrier for entry gold selling market, it’s really a non-issue. If we were talking financial security, sure, but this is the gold reselling game.
Coders at this level have absolutely no reason to go after the low-barrier for entry gold reselling game that a script kiddy can bang out in a night. The profit just isn’t there for someone at this level.
The poor Mechagnomes won’t be able to take any gathering professions.
Agreed, it seems like this solution would be more a pain than the problem.
But the bots can supply mass cheaper mats on the AH! Gotta vote for them over this system that would drive prices through the roof. 