Maybe that trade-off should be more flexible and dependent on the "league" a given player wants to play in. The criteria could be more strict for the "pros" where cheating can lead to significant gains, like professional athletes who have to pass regular anti-doping tests, but you wouldn't expect the same invasive checks from (for example) people participating in a charity run.

The problem with your idea is that nobody wants to play with cheaters.

Everything that makes the game fun is defeated by a single cheater.

So people are just going to choose between playing with 0 cheaters or go play a different game.

Years ago I read about some game service that detected cheating and put cheaters into games with other cheaters. The author said it was pretty effective.

Reminds me of Game Dev Tycoon's clever anti-piracy trick, where they released a "cracked" version of the game on file sharing sites shortly after launch. The "crack" disabled the copy protection but also changed the gameplay so that NPCs would pirate your products in-game and drive you out of (virtual) business.

Good point, I haven't played games much since the late 90s and I'm returning to gaming only now (partially thanks to Proton), so my experience with multi-player is based mostly on modem or LAN parties with friends, where the social aspect helped to prevent cheating. I guess it's very different now when you can play with random people on the other side of the world.

Historically this is what game developers did, and the servers without anti-cheat enabled were rife with cheating.

When games switched from server browsers to matchmaking, they just defaulted to using the anti-cheat system.