[Reedx]

That would be really interesting! Although it'd be like offering a gym for cheaters, heh. A place for them to hone cheating tools and techniques that would end up back in the regular game.

But could avoid that if a game embraced it holistically, where the default is tool-assisted and anything goes.

[zrobotics]

Isn't one of the hardest parts of making these tools evading detection? An aimbot isn't that tremendously difficult to create, the hard part is creating an aimbot that is hard to differentiate from a skilled player.

If the competition is all using assists, then the sneaky aimbot that simulates slower human reflexes will lose to the bot that positions the sights directly on the opponent in <0.1ms. I like this idea, I don't see why it would make it any easier to develop the types of cheating systems that affect human players, and it might be fun for the types of players that enjoy things like tool-assisted speed running; where the ultimate aim is more about studying the underlying game mechanics to determine the algorithmically-optimal way to play. If the default is tool-assisted, then all the human players will be excluded by default.

[krageon]

Even in the very old days it was more of a balancing act: It's not super difficult to make it undetectable, but it will be slower. Slower means that you will always lose to the more detectable variants that somehow still manage to evade the technical filter (but not the people filter). The second segment will of course eventually get banned, but in the meantime you will keep losing to them.

[fzeroracer]

There's an interesting argument to be made that by embracing the cheating market wholesale, it divides the cheating community into separate units. Those that are happy to exploit games publicly and share code, versus those that would prefer to hide and benefit from it financially or otherwise.

In that sense, encouraging people to come forward with hacking tools means that you'll have a stronger awareness of how they're used. Then if you were to leave the less destructive methods of hacking alone, you could design your detection methods to explicitly examine those avenues of exploitation and maintain a clean separation of people who use outside tools and those who do not.

It's an attempt to combat the constant arms race of hacking by deflating it a bit.