Yhea, wasn't so bad back in the day. Since back then you were limited to how many clients you could open at once. But ever since the clientless bots came out, it just went crazy.
It is a great feat to make a clientless bot, but man, give a great tool out, and it gets abused to all hell.
Ever since they(TQ) included high profile items that could be mined, they gave one hell of an incentive for botters.
Then once again with mentor EXP.
Then when they made ninja's, it was like: Hey botters! We got a GREAT skill for you to abuse.
The root of the abuse is TQ. They provided the carrot on the stick, provided easy botting methods.
Also, and all of us old (co 1.0, and server 1 dudes) would know, that during the long stretch where TQ ignored the game, even though it was easy to get DB's, it wasn't "easy easy" to get them, even using aid programs, it took actual effort to get them.