VAC is a joke until they ban players and all start to cry on reddit/discord.
So I think it is fair to say the there haven't been billions of dollars of research spent on this problem.
[1] https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/anti-cheat-study-reveals-chea...
There are also the costs of the opportunities that cheating prevents from happening. Development would be much faster and more types of games could be made.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3099893/chinas...
Edit: I missed that you are the same commenter that I replied. sorry about that
Serial cheaters cheat just enough to give themselves an edge without making it obvious to the people watching them. By just looking at their stats, it can become very difficult (though not impossible) to differentiate a cheater from a pro player. This difficulty increases the odds of getting a false positive, necessitating a higher detection threshhold to avoid banning innocent players.
They try to make own matchmaking for possible statistical outliers so cheaters end up playing against each other. Of course, real good players can still get there and there are (at least used to) real humans on reviewing on those games to see if someone is actually a cheater. It is not a simple task, since you can cheat to be just slightly better than others and that is enough to be good.
And realistically, some real non-cheating players will by chance just have similar statistics to bots, especially since the bots will start doing their best to mimic real players.
Also many players don't need to cheat all the time; just in that critical moment when it really matters. Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually guaranteed win? Something like that probably applies to a many people and fields. This is even harder to detect with just statistics.
Also also reminds me of the "you can't respond in less than 100ms, and if start the sprint faster than that after the starting pistol then you're disqualified"-type stuff they have in the Olympics – some people can consistently respond faster and there's a bunch of false positives. Not great.
The difference is that IRL chess and a typical FPS game have very different availability of datasets. IRL chess has both fewer moves per game, and fewer games played in short succession than typical FPS games. Also, with FPS games there is a single metric to evaluate -- the shot landed or missed -- compared with chess where moves are ranked on a scale.
So I'd argue that it would be much easier to do a statistical model to predict a cheating aimbot than it would a cheating IRL chess player. I don't believe Magnus's proposition holds for prolific online chess players when they do dozens or more blitz/bullet games in a single day.
That's because he's an elite chess player. Him cheating once per game could make the difference between being number 1 or number 10 but either way he's up there.
But for you or me, cheating once per game wouldn't make a difference. We'd still be ranked as nobody plebs. To get ranked high enough for people to know our names we would have to cheat dozens of times a game, and experienced players would easily peg us as cheaters.
Try cheating on chess.com, if you cheat enough to make a meaningful difference their servers will automatically nail you with statistics.
Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually guaranteed win
Because if you force all the cheaters to hide well enough to look like "normal" players, no one will know, and the game feel will not be negatively impacted. Outside of the tippy top of competition where money becomes involved, it's kind of irrelevant if the game is technically fair, as long as it feels fair to everyone.
At the end of the day someone could be using hardware "cheats" but you can get down to a pretty good spot to stop or disincentivize cheaters without running rootkits on their devices.
At the very least, this is less capable than wallhacks from reading memory.
I would say that it takes few years still before people have good enough hardware before AI can be used in real-time. You can use OpenCV and train things against specific game to get a decent performance with image recognition, but it is not that reliable.
The average player isn't a developer and doesn't need such things, so some game devs defer to the side of caution. The false positives are a miniscule and acceptable fraction of players.
They even claim to be able to fingerprint players according their playstyle, thwarting all methods of ban evasion. Skepticism should be abundant here, but this one of the oldest tricks in ML: categorization/clustering. I'm cautiously hopeful.
This would be server-side by nature.
Also if your guns aren't _perfectly_ accurate then the aimbot can't actually predict much of anything.
Evolutionary pressures on cheaters drives them to get better.
Eventually someone finds a stable chink in the server armor and it is exploited en masse.
The goal is to make it inconvenient to cheat on average.
There’s probably some ratio of games with cheaters to games without cheaters that players can tolerate that governs this.
I think they intentionally have the knob turned all the way up to 0.1 initially, for PR and lube reasons.