> detect the supernatural aim server-side

Not possible. Sure, it might be possible to detect a player instantly snapping to the center of an opponent's head and clicking, but cheats could easily make the aim move over the course of several frames, and make the target off of the center of the head by a couple pixels to simulate someone just being really good.

I've watched some really good gamers in person. People's ability to quickly flick their mouse and pop shot to a target only 1/4" inch wide on their screen in a tiny fraction of a second is insane to me.

So being able to differentiate between a cheat that tries to behave like a god-like player (rather than simply aiming to a head in a single frame) and an actual god-like player is not possible.

> a working report system.

Also not possible because of the sheer number of reports. There are people that will report 100% of the time they lose a firefight, even if a replay makes it very obvious that the person they lost against was not cheating.

And again, even with a replay, it can be impossible to differentiate between a cheater and a really good player, except in the case of OBVIOUS cheats, like shooting through a wall with 100% accuracy, or firing into nowhere and scoring hits on targets a mile away.

At best, you could ban people from using the report system when it's obvious they're abusing it, but evaluating reports has to be a manual process, but manual processes doesn't scale when you've got a player base of 7 figures or more.

But if a cheater really is subtle enough to be indistinguishable from a highly skilled player, is it really a problem? I mean, I guess it's "unfair" to genuinely skilled players but come on, it's just a game.

It is because losing in a competitive gaming is not fun. That's why those games take care to match you with players that are 'as good' as you.

To be fair, so are football, baseball, etc. And if you get caught cheating in those, it's a pretty big deal.

Or increase the role of aim and reflex when determining rank.

Should also reduce smurfing somewhat - you'd only be able to dominate a match once with a given account.

Never thought about that approach before, that is super interesting. Tying it entirely to rank isn't the best, but placing you in lobbies on an axis that is independent (but correlated with) rank would achieve the same effect without clogging high-ranks with cheaters and giving cheaters a reward.

Then the cheaters organically get placed in lobbies with other cheaters, ruining the fun for them. If the system doesn't work the best right out of the box, that's fine, because you are still gravitating those cheaters upwards in rank, which will most guarantee that they get reported from other players.

I've tried to write a bot for a website and it caught naive bots and just put them in the same lobby as other bots. If wasting time of abusers is your goal it's a pretty effective strategy.

It's very similar to shadow banning

Plenty of games have a server-side checking system that works on reports and statistical checking and it's a bit of a joke, like you say, it's an impossible fight. A pro-player of an FPS game is statistically so far beyond even fairly hardcore players that they trigger that constantly, so quite a lot of the most popular pro-players have their accounts and their alt-accounts whitelisted by the devs or the esports tournaments that host private servers. Which, of course, undermines the system entirely.

The problem with "a working report system", by which I take it to mean you have actual humans reviewing reports, does get you somewhere, but it doesn't touch 'humble' cheats, ie: rather than headshotting everyone 100% of the time, a cheat that lowers your recoil 15%. For an already very good player, -15% recoil in CS:GO or PUBG is a crazy, crazy advantage... and yet you couldn't notice it by looking at a video.

Even though it's an impossible fight to win completely, I don't think the answer is to "give up early".

1. Not all cheats are aimbots. In a game like Warzone where you are playing with 99 other plays, wallhacks are a very valuable cheat. There are server side mitigations, but they aren't perfect in very situation

2. Ideally you want to prevent cheaters from playing a single game. Reporting cheaters does nothing as legitimate customers still have to deal with cheaters and cheaters will just make new accounts.

The point of most anti cheat is not %100, but a significant enough reduction. If you make it super annoying and expensive to cheat, it's not going to happen that much in practice.