Are you kidding? In essence you are saying that it is illegal only if you get caught. You do realize that you are rationalizing unfair play? Greifing is greifing, regardless of what the person you are greifing is doing. Time and time again the game staff has told people NOT to take this type of thing into the gamers hands...yet here we are once again tip toing on the line of whats acceptable and whats not. If you dont like what someone is doing...report it and move on.
No, Restroom Cowboy. What the OP is doing is like if my house got broken into 3 times in 3 weeks and so I installed an alarm system which would instantly alert police if one of the doors or windows was opened without the correct code. Then, when the thief comes back, you would say I am the criminal because I engaged in entrapment. It's not an exact analogy but it is basically what you are arguing. If someone broke into my house 3 times in a row then yes I can reasonably assume they will be back and yes I can assume my security system is going to catch them next time and get them arrested. That doesn't matter because if the individual had not been engaging in an illegal activity in the first place he wouldn't have had this problem.
A couple of comments on other (non quoted) thoughts in the thread so far:
1) I don't believe that scripting will directly cause player loss, it will only indirectly help contribute to it by making the economy harder on a new player. And, I would submit, even if someone leaves UO for EQ, or WOW, or any other major pay-to-play MMORPG I can think of, they are going to run into third party program-run automated play/exploits of every imagineable variety. You can go on youtube and watch videos players have taken of hunter bots run probably by either lazy players or by the "gold farming sweatshops" overseas which sell in-game gold and rare drops for U.S. dollars on the internet. So this is not a problem you will escape by leaving UO. (This is NOT to be misconstrued as a defense of scripting , at all. I just think there are plenty of good solid arguments upon which to attack scripted play without having to make up a fantasy scenario that new players are aware of it and indignant and leaving in droves over it.)
2) What we are dealing with is, in my view, often a matter of integrity of the game server provider in question, whether we're talking about EA or Vivendi or Blizzard. On the one hand you have accounts engaging in exploits to farm valuable things in game, inflating the economy, and supplying a virtual black market of ebay and more nefarious website selling of game items. On the other hand these accounts often are paying accounts, and so expecting the game's server provider or owner to act in the most stringently upright manner in protecting the game's ruleset integrity is like asking the wolf to guard the henhouse. In the case of WOW, as an example, there are occasional "high profile" bannings of accounts with duped items and purchased or sold gold. But the real truth of the matter is that if they had a foolproof way to detect every single account with gold or items purchased third-party, and banned them, you'd be talking about banning a million or more accounts. That's never going to happen. In addition, in their eagerness to addict new players, MMORPG companies are very generous in their handing out of free accounts, trial accounts, free client downloads, trial periods, etc. In the case of WOW it's become an issue of no matter how efficiently they ban accounts they can detect for sure are related to gold trading/selling operations from websites, it doesn't matter, because a new character named zzhadfasdfhadsfhdfadfgagh appears 45 seconds later in the same spot on a new trial account.
3) I don't think it will be until an MMORPG seriously makes an earnest effort to build a vital and dynamic in-game closed economy , makes that a feature of the game, and then has an interest in protecting its integrity, that we will see any real effort to totally eliminate these kinds of exploits. UO has been a case of opting towards what's more popular to a majority of players (which usually means making the acquisition of items easier and easier over time in some form or another) rather than what was better for controlling the long term stability or inflation of the in-game economy. There are even semi-formal papers and studies that have been done about the dev decisions on UO's economy which have negatively impacted its development in the long-run. No MMORPG on the market today that I am aware of is committed to a realistic, persistent game world and economy which players are the prime movers and shakers in influencing rather than game/NPC-created/spawned/dropped items and gold and resources being the primary constant infusion of the economy.
Post-Script regarding #1. I think whether you acquired your massive wealth, house(s) and rewards, decos, gear and such through legit work or through bots is ultimately irrelevant when it comes to considering the new player. It doesn't matter HOW you earned that stuff, what impacts the new player is that he pops into the game and you already have all this stuff and everything your NPC vendors are selling costs 5,000 gold+ and is geared only towards other equally affluent, old, developed characters. Make a new character with 50 in a trade skill and go try to make a profit in any way other than escorting NPC's in New Haven... it's kind of a joke. So if we get into the issue of how economic considerations hurt the new player, the fact that the existing population of UO is so top heavy with so many old players who've been hanging on and at the top end of the game for so many years, with so few (or even hardly any!) new or middle-level players, legit players are pretty much just as liable as botters in terms of making a nonviable rock-and-hard-place scenario for the new player.
go ahead, make one & prove you know what UO griefing is 
