[cosmic_cheese]

My naive take is that technical solutions are possible, but critically they can’t be fully automated. The most effective anti-cheat solution possible probably looks something like a full-time in-house team comprised of seasoned ITSEC, data nerds, a couple of ML people, and a few devs. A team like that could probably pick out and boot cheaters with a very low rate of false positives given adequate data to crunch, and they’d only get better over time as they build a roster of patterns and behaviors to match against.

The problem is that this costs more than game companies are willing to spend, even when they’re raking in cash hand over fist. As long as the problem isn’t so bad that it’s making players quit, it’s cheaper to employ more automated, less effective strategies. The end goal isn’t player happiness, it’s higher profit margins.

[Rohansi]

I work on one of the games mentioned in this article and you're underestimating cheaters and cheat developers. We're doing this already and we're one of the smaller studios, so the larger studios are for sure doing it on a larger scale. Cheaters are still managing.

[Hikikomori]

Love the 'why don't devs just do x, its so simple' like all other devs are some monkeys just banging their keyboard.

[cosmic_cheese]

To be fair, I did couch my post right in the first sentence. I wasn’t faulting other devs with it though, not keeping an anti-cheat team or if one exists, not keeping it flush with top notch talent and resources would be the fault of management and the suits at the top, not that of ICs in the trenches like devs.

[frollogaston]

Always wondered if some distribute fake cheats that snitch or worse. That'd put the cheaters on defense instead of just offense. Yeah people can make their own, but most aren't.

[bhawks]

Sadly I would imagine that this would give the legal department nightmares.

[frollogaston]

It would have to be vigilantes, not the game studio

[J_McQuade]

I think this is the most reasonable take I've seen here. As my sibling comment mentions, people are already doing this. I think that - if anything - my point is that this is being done, but separately to the social element. You could get a hundred PhDs to look at the data and identify a cheater, but what you really want to avoid is someone that 9/10 people don't want to play with... and only the players can really tell you who that is. Data from the PhDs would help, though!

I've not really thought about it so deeply until right exactly now (thanks, all!), but I think doing so might have led me to a very unpopular opinion - I might be prepared to say that this problem can't be solved in an anonymous environment. Unless you have a reputation to ruin (or, say, an xbox account to lose), then being outed as a cheater costs you nothing. Again, this is incompatible with a lot of current multiplayer modes - and most of what I love about PC gaming - but, ultimately, I'd rather be judged by my peers than a rootkit.