alt Hacker NewsHonestly I'd prefer it if games could permaban based on just heuristics and the EULA simply stated "tough luck, buy the game again". I'd happily pay for that, knowing my money is at least not going to some 2 year legal fight.
I get that I might be the one accused of cheating next time. But if that risk is tiny and the cost when it happens is $50 or $100 it sounds a lot more attractive than the alternative.
Also (obviously) I don't care about the account itself. I wouldn't play a game where I aggregate long term stats/items/status/whatever.
In a perfect world you just have private servers where you can have 90% effective anticheat and have humans sort out the rest.
I think stat based bans are the ultimate solution for all the client side bullshit.
If you use statistics, you will sometimes get it wrong, but in the other cases the cheaters are completely out of luck. You could offer the source code to your game willingly and it wouldn't help them very much.
If the cost of a false positive is $50 for the gamer and the chance of it happening is rare, I think many would quickly understand the value proposition from a game experience perspective.
Assuming your false negative rate is low (I.e., you have high classification margins), you can make it extremely undesirable for players to engage in unfair play. Even soft cheating like aiding teammates with streaming and discord side channels could get picked up by these techniques.