[myrmidon]

Baiting alone is not a reliable long-term solution, because it both interferes with competitive games (a lot) and because it requires you to basically stay on top of a captcha escalation (especially once cheaters limit themselves to "realistic" reaction time constraints), and this is a bad position to be in (because it means continuous effort for the developer).

The most helpful approach in my view is to make fresh accounts expensive for cheaters so they can't iterate easily; if the game developer can extract profit from such ban circumvention attempts then all the better.

[iscoelho]

You'd be surprised to know that this strategy works quite well! Pixel bots require a hardware fake display when faced with kernel anti-cheat. They also depend on color/pattern recognition, as AI is not yet capable of operating at the frame rates required for competitive games. That allows the bait to be seen by a bot, but invisible to the eye.

If you are successfully baited and detected, you also get HWID banned, so it only takes once. This makes cheating via pixel bot unviable.

On the contrary, DMA is so desired because it eliminates this risk.