Yeah, will be interesting to see how the new ruleset servers fare. Short term they'll be popular out of curiosity, but I wonder how it'll go long term. Removing the abomination that is ToA is potentially a good thing but the trouble is that ToA abilities and bonuses were used as a band aid to fix class imbalances (rather then fixing the root causes) and all the New Frontiers changes, including realm abilities, and new Catacombs classes were developed with ToA in the mix. So, remove ToA and game balance will probably go even further out of whack. They'd need to readjust classes on the new servers, but have said that's very unlikely to happen.
As for buffs on range, this won't actually stop the buffbot problem. It won't stop those who have always run with a bot stapled to their backside, nor those who like to camp places where they can park their bot somewhere safe but still within range (5000 units is beyond clipping range). And bots will still be usable during keep defence, parked safely in the lord room, but not so viable for the attackers - so that messes up keep battles.
The better solution would be to rethink buffs across all servers and do something like WoW where the essential buffs are spread across several different classes, not concentrated in one main buffing class per realm (which is the fundamental problem).
When I heard of the new server types I must admit I was tempted (I have US accounts) but the more I think about it I'm not convinced the changes go far enough and I also don't fancy doing the level grind again, especially without a buffbot to speed things along (kind of ironic I know).