[ssteeper]

I've played 3000+ games of competitive Halo Infinite over the last year while climbing to top 1% and only had 1-5 games with noticeable cheating. It's nowhere near "ubiquitous and rampant". In the singular game with blatant aimbotters, it was actually a really close and exciting game because while their aim was perfect, their strategy and game sense was atrocious. So with good communication and coordination on our side, we were able to outsmart them and win.

[owalt]

Most people have no idea how to detect basic non-blatant cheats. Even simple low-FoV aimbots sneak past the vast majority of players. Good enough cheats are virtually undetectable by just human inspection.

The few people you saw cheating were probably frustrated enough with the game they decided burn their accounts and ticked enough boxes in their cheat menus to let them go out with a bang. It may of course be that you are particularly good at spotting cheats and Halo Infinite is just blessed to be relatively cheater-free. (I've not played it.) But I'd expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more games to have cheaters than your estimate.

[Aeolun]

If I’m not able to determine that someone is cheating, do I care? That’s no different from my perspective as them just being really good.

Whether they’re actually that good is immaterial.

When they go beyond what a good player could do is where it gets problematic.

[vintermann]

Why do you even play online then? You could play against local bots.

The human connection matters, even to cheaters. Cheating against the computer isn't very satisfying.

[Aeolun]

Do you ever feel like bots feel like really good humans? Even a (potentially) cheating human player is more interesting than a bot

[rowanG077]

That's totally false. Many single player games have build in cheats precisely because it's fun. Even if it's against the computer.

[Gigachad]

If you accept that, then you may as well play against bots locally.