I think I witnessed a possible way they are tracking Gather bots.

[kazoody]

So I was leveling an alt when I came out of a dungeon with full bags and needed to empty. I noticed a had quiet a few "satchel of useful goods" but I couldn't open them. So I logged out and came back in and tried again nothing. So I re-queued for dungeons (as tank) and noticed it had a 45min queue time and wasn't popping instantly anymore. So I decided to out on my hunter a do a some farming. All day today farming ore was pretty hard people were botting like crazy, the air traffic was significantly heavy as in it seemed no matter where I went near nods there was someone (mostly bots) near the nods(why I got on my alt). So I hit my first nod and I can't loot it, try it again still can't loot it, move to another same thing. So I kill a mob and I can't loot it, I send a message to a friend and ask if he can loot anything and he says he can't. So I start seeing bots collect on nods some must have ninja on. others move along, Than I start noticing them logging off and since then the traffic is all but gone and I'm able to find a lot more nods and 3 of the people I added to my friends list have not logged back in and its been about 20-30mins. Randomly after I see these folks log out about 2 mins later you could loot again, no server restart no server message. Food for thought though.

 

[ryftobuddy]

Nope, it was just server lag. Bots got logged off and people weren't there to log back in. That's all it was.

 

[legicide]

To be fair, I've had it bug and not be able to open bags or collect herbs on my main account that has never been botted. Seems just to be weird server lag.