I remember watching botted account "playing" in net cafe. It took about an hour killing this giant wolf/tiger mech along with other players. The XP bar barely budged upon killing it.
The first bot is ... a tape. A scotch tape. In Final Fantasy III (USA) they use a scotch tape on the D-pad and on the B button of a Super NES controller so the command gets looped indefinitely on one part of the game - the waterfalls. They only release the tape when the characters reach level 99. Which saves them the time for leveling up at least 3 characters, as the 4th character is an NPC and will leave the party ( after defeating Ultros ).