[buran77]

> so much effort is placed on trying to identify and hamper cheaters in real time, when that both seems extremely resource intensive and unnecessary, considering you have all the digital evidence proof of cheating you need after the fact, you just have to understand what you are looking at

It's not resource intensive at all compared to the alternative of ahaving humans doing post match reviews. It's all "AI" and automated reviews because it's cheaper. Half of the "anti-cheat" tactic is anyway using your computer resources to run some anti cheat tool.

These games are optimized for revenue so every action is dictated by that. Including catching/banning cheaters. If it costs too much to do it properly, or (and this is actually plausible) cheaters are a significant enough portion of the already small chunk of players who create recurring revenue, then there's no incentive to take real action.

This data is probably useful for actual academic rather than practical purposes today. They're building the knowledge they might want to use in a few years.