I imagine it's similar to the logic behind locks on houses. Thieves still exist, but by making it harder for them, you reduce the chances of them targeting your house. You won't ever reduce that chance to zero, but you can reduce it significantly.

Similarly, I imagine the more effort you have to put in to get through anti-cheat software, the more likely you are you give up and play a different game. There'll still be some people determined enough to bypass it, but that number will be smaller than it would be otherwise.

Fwiw, I don't play these sorts of games, so I have no idea if this stuff is effective, but there's a comment somewhere in this thread saying that Valorant has fewer cheaters than other, similar games, in no small part due to their aggressive anti-cheating measures, so anecdotally it may well have an effect.

Bans come in waves. So they let cheaters cheat for a bit... but they are recording all the programs and processes that everyone is running. Then, once they see the issue as being big enough to warrant action, they ban the highest "80%" of people running the cheat, in the last "3 months" (or whatever time period).

I'm sure there's some magic threshold where they say, "Eh, this kid only had it running for a week, and the account he was running it on was 8 years old, and gosh... we really don't want more customer support calls and complaints. Let's let a few slide." I'm sure there is some sort of "how serious is this offense" algorithm.

Video games have so many cheaters, but it's rare for the accounts to stay active for more than 3-6 months.

But you're right, they should ban faster, and they should do more to stomp out cheating. For people who play by the rules... it seems unjust that they don't ban faster.

One theory is that they time ban waves to increase sales. "Oh sales are down this month, better ban some more folks so they'll re-buy the game with new accounts."

Don't forget, in a lot of games, players buying in-game currency (or items) is what fuels bots / cheating. The game makers need this sort of behavior to keep some percentage of "legitimate" players (the indirect cheaters) happy and on the platform.

I'm sure they have all the math worked out. They ban at exactly the pace needed to maximize profit.

> I play on consoles now, and the fact that there are no cheaters is probably half the reasons why

There are definitely fewer cheaters overall on console but there are more than you may think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC1dcQqCqFc / https://www.cronusmax.com/

That thing might help you with recoil, but it doesn’t see through walls and auto aim.

I'd encourage you to check out Counter-Strike servers which are NOT VAC-secure. Or, well... I don't know how much these servers exist anymore, with matchmaking being so dominant. But back before CSGO, if you joined a server that didn't have VAC enabled, you would have about a 90% chance of it being unplayable due to speedhacking, spinbots, etc. The other 10% was probably still full of people fine-tuning their use of aimbots, wallhacks, etc.