The reason they removed /follow is actually to combat bots. Think about it this way.

A bot that automatically /follows a player skips all the more advanced but easier to predict tile systems a more advanced bot uses.

This means that any pattern system they implement will miss them.

What pattern system? Something I'll address here.


Lets say for each account and character the server records an array of floats for X, Y and Z. These are the character locations, or plots if you prefer, for a time and place. For each event that is deemed worthy (such as stopping mid flight for example), a plot is recorded.

Then as the plots are recorded against new events a pattern recognition test is done against N number of previous plots where N is Blizzard's discretion. This could be designed on the client side as a simple numerical comparison that gives no identification of what it does. While those guys who run bot forums may disagree, reverse engineering the code gives them no heads up as to what an ambiguous piece of code does. They'll just placate their customer base by stating 'no, it doesn't do this' when they actually have no idea.