Cheaters should be publicly outed in a way that significantly harms their lives and discourages others from following a similar path.
Not actual violence, mind you. Something like making it more difficult to get a job, or book a plane ticket, or similar.
Or maybe that's ridiculous and extreme, just like lasting real-world consequences for online cheaters.
Are you suggesting that cheaters in video games (not played in a competition for money, just playing casually) should suffer career, travel, and social consequences in the real world away from the game?
Oh and let's not forget, if people lose more than just the satisfaction of winning when someone steals their win with cheats I'd say they also have issues they should deal with. In addition to that cheating in games has been a common first step towards a good career in the field of cybersecurity, if they'd been punished irl for cheating I'm quite certain they wouldn't be working in that field - do we really want to go on figuratively or literally slapping children for what really are just minor deviations from the regular?
Your train of thought is similar to those who think zero-tolerance policies are a good idea - punishment on it's own never is.
"Quite literally meaningless" is a massive stretch. At the very least, you're opening yourself up to legal hilarity (it's not cost effective to pursue individual cheaters beyond terminating their accounts generally, but then again, bot makers have been sued) - the reason this is a thing is that you're ruining the service for others.
Oh and let's not forget, if people lose more than just the satisfaction of winning when someone steals their win with cheats I'd say they also have issues they should deal with.
Please don't presume to tell other people what they should and should not find important.
And if cybersecurity people can't learn without ruining other people's limited downtime, perhaps we need less cybersecurity people.
So the only reason it is meaningful somehow is because it's somehow legally meaningful? That's both a bad argument for something to have irl consequences and I heavily doubt it's correct.
> Please don't presume to tell other people what they should and should not find important.
I didn't say what people should find important or not, it's how important some game in someone's life should be. I think what I was trying to say is that noone likes bad losers and sometimes losing is character-building. Better meet people who cheat you in a pretty meaningless game rather than in real life for the first time.
> And if cybersecurity people can't learn without ruining other people's limited downtime
You always have offline games.
> perhaps we need less cybersecurity people
Maybe we need less salty gamers.
Losing in a video game does not lead to those things. You're playing a game. Next you'll say that if someone slips themselves an extra $500 as the banker in Monopoly they should be waterboarded for committing grand larceny.
And the usual stipulations about minors being treated differently than adults apply.