as much as I dislike bots, they keep the market going in terms of items and the price down. Adena sellers are there, I get a pm every time I'm in aden. So it's going on. The price of adena actually determines the market too.
Years ago you could literally go price a specific item on the 3rd party sites and determine its adena value in game based off that. Like epic jewels or over enchanted gear. A lot of people had no clue that this was really how the market worked. You could also buy an item or a whole account off a 3rd party site. NC knew this and periodically they would do minor housekeeping or a software update that would put the bots down for a days to a week if that. There is also a pvp 3rd party program whose name I won't mention. The lagging when you're near some players isn't because of multi boxes, it's third party programs.
Years ago I got nailed for disabling the third party detection thing they had that would load, lots of us would disable it to speed up loading the game and make it run better. It was just a matter of removing a file and replacing it with another. I didn't get any punishment for it, just a warning. NC does catch it, but bots keep the lights on to put it one way. The market in game would be trash, you could always tell after an update when third party programs were down, within a week basic craft materials would skyrocket in price. Bone, leather,thread...you know common stuff used to make high grade materials for gear.
As much as I disliked the bots I also knew what they did for the market, sometimes in dungeons if we could agree on which rooms we each got we could do our business and they did theirs. other times I'd log onto another account and clean out a spot. Know your bots though, if you wipe out a party it may have belonged to a power clan on the server and that's going to be some heat for you.
This is from what I experienced over the years, maybe not currently going on, I haven't played live servers for probably 5 years maybe 6.