Server side enforcement is not only heavy, but has much of the same problems as the client side. It's running on a layer even higher than the client side anti-cheat. How can you tell if someone is running an aimbot or just has good aim? Sure if they do something outright impossible you could ban them, but heuristic approaches are going to have problems with false positives as well as false negatives.
> How can you tell if someone is running an aimbot or just has good aim?
That's the point. I don't care. As long as the game is enjoyable. And I'm sure AI can be gradually trained to detect cheating in more sophisticated manner do differentiate non human from human patterns. Not a trivial issue, but something they should invest money in as above, instead of rootkits.
14:22:01 *Shmerl has joined the game
14:22:02 [DefinitelyNotAnAimbot] headshots Shmerl
14:22:05 [AnotherTotallyHumanPlayer] headshots Shmerl
14:22:07 [DefinitelyNotAnAimbot] headshots Shmerl
14:22:07 DefinitelyNotAnAimbot is on a killing spree!
14:22:10 *Shmerl has left the servermultiplayer game have the choices: a) ship game with malware/trojan to try to prevent cheats, or b) open up for cheats (even if client side only, like see trhu walls)
Most popular games chose option A (and still fail preventing both client side and remote hacks)
here is another idea: proper ranking of player abilities! crazy right? something so simple should be a day-one feature right? that would put all the hackers together and they could even compete in their own hacking league... 100% of clients satisfied!
now think about game companies failing to put that single feature to work correctly, what changes do you think a AI that detect human behaviour have or working well in that space? :(
Some developers aren't even denying that it's nasty, but excuse it with "no one cares anyway" or "we already could snoop on you, so don't complain if we make it even worse" which is disgusting.
Example: https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null-anti-...