Kodiak -- if you or anyone else thinks that auto combat will help anyone, ANYWHERE, and do anything other than provide a brief amusement, at the risk of being labeled a bot, I question what you are are calling 'auto-combat' and your labeling it 'gamebreaking'. Puleeze, It was imperfect as it was. It only worked because they set up a zone where there weren't many obstacles and there were constantly spawning monsters. Second, getting low-level, untradeable mats from there hardly seems any more game breaking that doing the same with auto-fishing.
As for Dad (first responder), a game is intended to *entertain you*. There isn't really only 1 way to play other than what you make of it. I mean someone could equally say playing a game is about getting off your duff and using your body to go out and toss a ball with friends (keeping social distance + wearing gloves, ofc).. and that pushing buttons with your fingers isn't about play at all, but a weird type of work. What makes it play -- whether or not it is fun.
Now here's one for you. I don't type fast and never will. Are those who have the dexterity of a teen and can mash buttons faster than I ever have in my life, using something that not everyone one has? Of course! Not everyone has the most nimble fingers to compete on a level playing ground with skilled players, yet those same players don't think twice about using their natural superiority over others in reaction time and super-dexterity that most people will never have to beat them in pvp and to leave them behind in pve (including shutting them out of groups). You think that's ok, but using a bot that would never win anything should be labeled as game-breaking cheating?
In a book NCSoft designers contributed to on designing mmo's, one of the contributers talks about how it is not fun for lower skill and more casual players to always get beaten on the game field. They talked about ways to automatically adjust for that to level the playing field and to give the widest range of people the ability to compete and have fun. WE aren't talking about professional competition, but ways so that groups of players don't go off and form their own exclusive groups to more easily exclude new, more casual and less talented players so they can get to endgame more quickly.
Problem associate with that, is that you can't favor both types of audiences -- new users/casual users or end-game users. Ultimately it comes down to a tradeoff. To focus on endgame harms the environment for new players and eventually causes damage in that the game can't draw in replacement players fast enough to support the exit of those at endgame with nothing else to do. I.e. by focusing on endgame players, you will make the game fun for them "for a little while", until there is nothing more and the game has to close up. By focusing on new players and their continued development -- the ones they will lost are those who are at the end of the game -- who'd be lost anyway. Without a steady stream of new players, the devs have taken the road toward killing the game, consciously or not. It's hard to believe a company that's been in business as long as NCSoft, wouldn't know what they were doing.
And to put the bow on this -- do you really think any auto-fighting player bot would have any chance on any level against end game players?
Puleeze!