Enforce your terms of service.
What is the point of playing if the game isn’t fair? MMO’s are about investment of time and when bots and gold buyers get to play by different rules it cheapens the whole experience. It makes players feel stupid for playing the game. Why would a player farm when they could just buy gold from a bot for cheap who can clear instances in two seconds by flying around to the last boss? Why work to join a raid team when they can just sign up for a GDKP and buy gear?
The bots have to stop. The examples of botting are so blatant and obvious it is insulting. Armies of bots plaguing Maradon, ZG, Strath live, BRD, Dire Maul, and running around out in the world.
Looking at the incentives and the reasons behind why there are bots, it is easy to blame the players. The only reason there are bots is because of these players buying gold and buying characters. From this we can see the seductive logic behind the WoW token and level boosts. Take care of the bots by removing the demand gold and level boosts by supplying it directly via a wow token and boost purchases. They are going to do it anyway so why not offer them directly? Suits love this solution because in theory it solves the problem while creating more revenue for Blizzard / Activision a win win.
However look at things from game design philosophy which focuses on changes that foster the best parts of WoW classic and MMO’s in general which are player collaboration and community. This change incentivizes people not to play the game but to break out their wallets, and ultimately cheapens the player experience and effort therefore hurting the game in the long run.
What this problem needs is more active human intervention.
There are several ways to accomplish this. The best solution at this time is more employees with the tools and resources need to detect cheaters. Clearly the 5 game masters which were working on classic was not enough. Sadly this is the least likely to happen because it involves additional resources from Blizzard/Activision which judging by their past decisions does not have any interest whatsoever in making this a reality.
The next best solution would be to crowd source the problem. This has already been done to some extent with the report tool. However even with that the botting and gold selling was rampant. If Blizzard/Activision doesn’t want to enforce the TOS give the community the ability to with better tools. This of course comes with its own problems because it opens the door for player abuse. Even with the limited power of the report feature players found a way to abuse it by mass reporting of players grinding for high warlord, grand marshal, and scarab lord to get them temporarily banned and set back. This is the why I believe hiring people is a better option despite it costing the company money. However I would still prefer the community having stronger tools to self moderate to nothing at all.
Some kind of AI cheat detection. This is Blizzard/Activision ideal solution, but as evidenced by the rampant bots the implementation is not there yet. Until an effective automatic anti-cheat is developed the previous options listed are necessary.
Actually enforcing the terms of service is by far the most important change that could be made to wow classic season of mastery. All the other changes are without this just lipstick on a pig.
TL;DR ban bots and take action against gold sellers / buyers