The great part is many games have the aimbot built in. Players use a hardware dongle to make a keyboard/mouse look like a controller input, and the game applies aim-assist to the keyboard/mouse input.

You don't get mouse axis movement though -- it emulates it through a Controller stick so it's not exactly an ergonomic and mouse-like experience, from what I have heard.

Have you ever played Warzone? People sniping 700+ meters and they can't even see you on their screen. Obvious map hacks, aim bots, and even some hilarious shit like super speed or the ability to drive a car through walls to run you over.

Besides, it's not just a matter of improving accuracy. Elite players are elite in multiple facets of the game. Movement, general awareness, map awareness, accuracy, etc. Many of these metrics are easy to measure.

Cheaters will show up as outliers and it is at that point that their accounts should be manually reviewed.

With casual gaming I really don't even care if someone is "cheating" to improve so long as I feel the game was fair. I can put a red dot on my screen to improve my aim, as an example.

Warzone is weird. I can't understand why speedhacks, 'silent aim' (you can shoot in a direction different from your view angle) or flying cars are even a thing.

This was impossible in Q3A (1998) without introducing an input lag thanks to client side prediction. Server also didn't send you updates on other clients that are too far away, behind a hill - you'd pretty much only receive positions of those you could see, hear or that could see you. In Warzone, you can see everyone on the map with a wallhack.

I really wonder why the game is designed this way. I guess it might be to limit required computation power of the servers? They still do stuff like hit detection, so server surely has some idea of the physics.

On top of all that, this stuff is possible even today, months or even years after such exploits being widely known. They do have a kernel-level AC driver, but they don't even seem to detect trivial hacks from the server-side.

If other players can't tell someone is cheating then it's not actually a problem since everyone will feel the game was fair.

In competitive gaming, having an actually fair game matters more than having a fair feeling game.

In proper competitive gaming (ie. with a prize pool) you can apply much more rigorous standards like kyc, a live video feed; even standardized hardware and drug tests.

In magic the gathering, the standards are divided in three: casual (called regular), competitive and professional. Basically the competitive mode is for people who play the game to win, sometimes with small prizes, but still want a very clean playing field. I feel that the standardized hardware and drug tests are feasible at professional, but not competitive, and anti cheat rootkits is interesting in competitive.

The area between thinking others are "absolutely not cheating" and "definitely cheating" is huge, and where most online gamers end up spending their time. Absolutely cheating is not a problem, because most games allow you to report people, and they'll get enough reports and be banned shortly. Not being able to tell is the problem, because you feel something was unfair (which you might also feel when it actually is fair), but you feel it more often and it leads to poor experiences and people quitting the game.

Cheaters quit after a while because the game loses its challenge, and people being cheated leave because the game.feela unfair, and eventually there's not much of a community left.

Ah, the old Lance Armstrong argument.