The herbologist puzzles are terrible. What winds me up is having to do them even though I'm not a herbologist i.e. underwater when I pick coral. For some reason I have to do a puzzle very frequently. That in itself is annoying but the fact some of them are incredibly hard to do is my biggest problem.
Why are the puzzles even a thing? ESPECIALLY underwater where coral is only useful for one thing afaik!!
If you're worried about bots then fair enough, but implement a better system - I know, how about a limit on how many resources you can pick in a day, like monsters you can fight or energy you gain from monsters. No idea what the limit would be but I'm sure it could be figured out.
Let me have a try - fastest are grey resources at around 3 picks a minute, that's 180 an hour, so how about around 6hrs worth which would be c1000 max (not including triples from red toolds etc). So make 1000 max daily "picks" or reduce as per resource "time to pick" scales. Or have a max time pickable in a day like 6 or 8 hrs for instance, pretty sure someone could come up with some code to set a daily timer when you have a tool equipped.... although, maybe not judging by the simple errors around the site that NEVER get fixed , you know, like typos & Russian texts.