Actually, i kinda agree with kork09 and i am looking forward to seeing the result of his report. Besides, botting is the ONLY thing that keeps D3 even alive at that point. Think about it- no sane people will play this game enough to actually find good items themselves and besides the RMAH there isn't another option to get good items. Who's fault is it, that D3 is unbelievably boring and unsatisfying as a game? There is only little, retarded content in the game; itemization if awful; there isn't anything fun to do. The PvP is a complete scam. And all this, a year after the release date. When you think about it, it seems as if we, as consumers, have been cheated.
That said, there have been examples of games that required botting, as D3 does, and have been successful to an extend. I've personally played Lineage2, where it was literally impossible to keep up with the game and have ANY kind of life beyond the game(aka Real Life) if you were not using bots. They started banning them, but soon realized, that the game is just too slow and hard and they decided to let people bot--> it worked fine, all the people who wanted to play started botting and the rest just quit. It didn't mean a significant lose in profits for the company, because for all the accounts of ppl who quit, there were botting accounts emerging, so it was probably the same for them.