Preventing cheating is hopeless.

Anyway, this isn’t the Olympics, a professional sport, or Chess. It’s more like pickup league. Preserving competitive purity should be a non-goal. Rather, aim for fun matches. Matchmaking usually tries to find similar skill level opponents anyway, so let cheaters cheat their way out of the wider population and they’ll stop being a problem.

Or, let players watch their killcams and tag their deaths. Camper, aimbot, etc etc. Then (for players that have a good sample size of matches) cluster players to use the same tactics together.

Treating games like serious business has sucked all the fun out of it.

The only solution that seems to work well that I've seen is having very active and good server admins who watch the gameplay and permaban cheaters. Requires a lot of man hours and good UI and info for them to look at, as well as (ideally) the ability to see replays.

That solution only works on servers hosted by players - I've never seen huge game companies that run their own servers (like GTA) have dedicated server admins. I guess they think they can just code cheaters out of their games, but they never can.

Do what Netflix did and run servers at ISPs (or at their providers or Cloudflare points).

It's kind of weird that we still don't have distributed computing infrastructure. Maybe that will be another thing where agents can run near the data their crunching on generic compute nodes.

I think from a purely technical viewpoint, cheaters will always have the advantage since they control the machine the game and anti-cheat is running on. Anti-cheat just has to keep the barrier high enough so regular players don't think the game is infested with cheaters.

Most people ignore that "do everything on the server" kills any game that needs fast interactions or decent local prediction, latency goes through the roof and you might as well play chess by email. There isn't a clean answer.

Kernel anti-cheat isn't an elegant solution either. It's another landmine, security holes, false positives, broken dev tools, and custody battles with Windows updates while pushing more logic server-side still means weeks of netcode tuning and a cascade of race conditions every time player ping spikes, so the idea that this folds to "better code disipline" is fantasy.

The solution is purely cultural. We should collectively think people who cheat online are losers.

(Not being sarcastic.)

I think it's somewhere between halting and turing - given infinite resources it's likely solvable, but lacking that it's just narrowing bounds

The only good long term solution is ML on replays + moderately up to date client side (non kernel) AC (just good enough to deter cheaters).

Mac OS with remote attestation has proven strong enough for anticheat on Mac OS without needing kernel anticheat.