When the devs added the abort limit to counter bot users, they basically put up the white flag and said cheating is okay, as long as you limit how much you cheat. That's how i took it and many others have agreed with that sentiment. All it did was encourage cheaters to get additional accounts to do RQs instead of doing them all from the same account (since inno is very weak on enforcing alt/multiple account issues).
Putting an abort cap did nothing to STOP or discourage cheating.
This is a much easier issue to wrangle that inno makes it out to be.
Conditions in which people will cheat:
1) The rewards are considered more valuable than the risk
2) It is easy to do
3) Low risk of getting caught and penalized.
4) If caught, the penalty is minimal
If you move any of these levers, you will reduce cheating.
1) Setup conditions such that players exceeding what is possible get ID'd and banned. Force cheaters to slow down their scripts to be more humanlike, and the benefit is much lower.
2) ID the most low-hanging fruit scripts. If only complex scripts are able to be used without getting caught, many players will not put in the effort (or have the ability, depending)
3) Proactively seek to find cheaters. Make sure cheaters know other cheaters are being caught. This is where the abort limit is a huge fail. Since it doesn't ID cheaters, there is no reason for them to stop cheating.
4) Permabans are a must. it doesn't have to be on the first infraction unless it's super blatant. Obviously, some scripts are much worse than others. The most egregious should get less/no wiggle room.
Short-term bans don't work because players can't see that anything happened. if someone's activity flatlines for 24 hour or less, no one will take notice. If someone is banned for a week, it becomes more noticeable. If a known/suspected cheater is gone for a month or more, players that care about rule enforcement will take notice.
Last thing - the rules of fair play really need to be updated a bit. The last update was in 2015. Since then, the game has changed completely. GBG, GE, PVP Arena, and other activities make push accounts more effective; therefore, simple activity in those areas does not (should not) automatically mean that the account is not a push account.
When players donate literally 50k-100k FP above and beyond break even on other players' GBs (usually just 1 player) and yet do not level their own GBs, it's pretty obvious what's going on. These accounts often do some gbg and ge to help increase their FP production, and yet they are still neglecting their own city. The 2015 rules make this type of
obvious pushing basically risk free. Cheaters get extra protection from getting banned/penelized by cheating more!
The flow of resources would be much better for ID'ing push accounts. (e.g. A massive flow of resources, usually FP or goods, going out from one player to another without reciprocation means either pushing or buying resources outside of the game which is also against the rules). The state of push accounts is so bad that players openly admit to using them in front of mods (in discord) because they know nothing will happen. (Don't believe me? send me a PM and I'll show you.)