It doesn’t have to be 100%. The point is to make it inconvenient. The majority of people will not do it if it is inconvenient.

Thats the point to many things in life that you just make it more difficult and most people won’t be bothered to attempt to circumvent whatever it is.

There will still be circumventers but it is will be less than if you just said fuck it.

Sure. That also means it doesn't have to be kernel-level rootkits that fundamentally break the security model of my operating system and risk my bank account. Most people will be stopped by userland anticheat, right? It's inconvenient. So ... put it *there.*

And if someone does the kernel bypass thing, well, rely on server-side heuristics (which are imperfect, but also unknowable to the attacker) and you'll discourage enough of that with account bans.

Helpfully eSports players tend to have video captures of their gameplay, and most of these "undetectable" cheats are real obvious if you actually watch the footage. That catches most of the serious stuff at the upper level. It's why video verification has been a thing in the speedrunning scene for such a long time.

The problem with userland stuff is that it’s trivial to download and doubleclick an EXE (that acts as a fake anticheat or whatever).

Anyone can do that, but not anyone can simply “patch the kernel” and such.

> Anyone can do that, but not anyone can simply “patch the kernel” and such.

Sure they can - download this pre-patched ISO and boot it in QEMU. Now you have a modified kernel, _and_ you’re not running dodgy spyware on your PC.

> Helpfully eSports players tend to have video captures of their gameplay, and most of these "undetectable" cheats are real obvious if you actually watch the footage. That catches most of the serious stuff at the upper level. It's why video verification has been a thing in the speedrunning scene for such a long time.

There's a subreddit called /r/vacsucks which is full of pro players blatantly cheating and getting away with it while the rest of the idiots think they're just good players.

Or, depending on your point of view, full of idiots flagging any player better than they are as cheating.

Aimbots can be "humanized" enough that any such determination becomes subjective.

Sure, and my point is that making it inconvenient for other people to cheat is a way too low bar for us to accept rootkits on our systems.

Correct. E.g. you can aimbot by routing the video signal to a capture card on a separate computer and run image recognition software to generate mouse movements spoofed at the hardware level. The only way to reliably prevent cheating is with in-person tournaments played on hardware provided by the organizers.

As someone said about the lack of a Switch anti-cheat: it's a numbers game. If cheating is as easy as downloading a .exe for a few $$$, you're going to find cheaters everywhere. If it requires a complex, and/or fairly expensive setup, the number is going to be very low.

That's assuming there's no money in being a cheater.

The best way is to just make private servers, so people can play with their friends and not have to worry about random players. This also solves the issue of people using.... language thats not acceptable in games.