[industriousthou]

I've thought a little about building cheating detection into the mechanics and lore of maybe an MMORPG by treating it like a forbidden dark art.

If a player is flagged for cheating, they could take on an "aura" in the game. Maybe different types of auras for different types of cheating or for the types of events that took place around the cheating. It could grow stronger with more flags or fade with time. Fine-grained detection of auras could be a sought-after perception skill.

The in-game community could decide how they want to treat different types of cheaters. You could see interesting things like self-segregation or vigilante organizations.

You still have to intervene a lot to block gold farming bots or whatever, but I think you can keep the vanilla players and most cheaters happy.