Honestly the bots aren't really a huge issue anymore. The meta right now is 2 front 2 mesmers (1 dom 1 wastrels interrupt spam) and typically either a paragon or a splitable air ele. Everyone is kind of on equal ground with interrupts these days.
Heres what I wrote up complaining to one of the devs last week:
Hey Joe, I know you are going to give that whole "game is in maintenance/report to support" thing you do - But let's be honest. That doesn't work. It hasn't worked for years. We are running into some game impacting/gvg experience issues. These are becoming major issues where one person is ruining the game for everyone. This seriously needs to be taken into consideration and escalated to someone who can take care of this. Let us do a quick overview:
1.
http://gw2w.de/ <- This is a player made working ladder. Notice the ability to "Show Unimportant Guilds". These "Unimportant" guilds are mainly syncers (and botters if I am not mistaken). Those who do not play this game but merely join gvg matches against each other to either have a high ranking/rated guild or to farm champ points.
2.
http://i.imgur.com/ACeQFTn.jpg <- This is a daily AT played morning American/Afternoon Euro. These ATs are always either dead or 3 rounds consisting of 6-8 guilds. All of these extra guilds? Afk syncing guilds who have entered purely to afk and grief everyone else actually playing. Now, you might say "but you get to play 5 rounds!". Normally that would be really cool. But if 2-3 of our 5 matches are hitting join only to find out my opponent is 2 afk players + 4 henchmen having a powwow with the Guild Lord, well, 1-2 hours of everyone's day just got wasted sitting around.
3. The ladder. Let's be honest. The ladder has been dead. It has been dead since ANet made the mistake of freezing rating and then nerfing ladder rating. However - There is a huge problem with these syncers that there are a few who have bots set up to wait for matches all day long. Once the match is entering - they will purposely leave before the countdown timer is up so no match officially occurs. This happens over and over. It prevents any ladder matches from ever even occurring. No rating is gained or lost.
The point is... You guys have claimed to have Guild Wars in a state of maintenance. This is not maintenance. The kind of maintenance you guys are doing right now are what countries do to maintain their Olympic venues after their hosted games are over. It gets covered in rot and filth and eventually people stop visiting. There are a few things that could fix this issue just to give you some ideas: Remove the GvG countdown timer = no time for the syncers to leave prior to a match. Only allow guilds with 1010+ rating to enter ATs. (Prevents all the syncing tanking guilds who can't sustain a positive rating to play ATs). Ban the players/guilds performing these actions.If none of the above problems and or solutions make sense, please let me know and I'll be more than happy to discuss these issues via phone, skype, or ts3.
You make good points, but you're assuming too much of their "state of maintenance". What they mean is that there's some content being rotated, so that the game's meta can still evolve and events will still occur without ArenaNet having to do any updates.
Fixing issues -- however glaringly obvious they might be (and the ones you pointed out are exactly this) -- is something I can't imagine them doing anymore.