petej wrote:How would you be able to destroy the mats with a bot ?  (serious question im not taking the micky or getting "anti" here lol)
-does it relie on the mats always going to the same slot in the inventory or would you be able to detect which slot they occupied regardless ?
 
If its slot dependant they could make taken mats occupy a random slot to defeat Auto-Destroying bots , lol getting complex but killing Bots would be worth some trouble imo
It would depend on the abilities of the software being used for the bot.  If it can only repeat keystrokes and mouse inputs at specific X,Y coordinates, then randomly specifying the inventory slot might work.  Even without this, you could just put everything you own on your packers so that any mats you got showed up in slot 1.
However, even with that, there are applications out there that can take samples of the graphics on the screen and make decisions based on the colors of pixels found.  If you were harvesting Anete Fiber for instance, it'd be pretty easy to find the text "Anete" that shows up in the corner of the icon and then tell the mouse to right click in that position.
BTW, the reason I'm familiar with this is because toward the end of my last game (Earth and Beyond), EA announced that unattended macros were allowed.  This was shortly after they announced the closure of the game.  At that point, I used some macros to get my chars to the max level before they shut down the server because I never would have been able to otherwise.