Pretty unfair to paint this as the users choice when the companies are taking our choices away.
If you need to protect competitive play, keep it to actual competitions/make it optional for free play. I'm not giving you unrestricted access to my brokerage account, all of my files, all of my emails/text messages, etc. (which root access on my computer has) so you can prevent cheating in a Sunday night video game.
Of course no security tools work if the game is root.
There are a couple reasons to care about doping in professional sports, that don’t apply here.
First off, these matchmaking games are not real professional competitions. It is more like a pickup game; the stakes are essentially zero. Nobody cares if you dope for your pickup games or your weekend bike rides for friends (other than that that would be a ridiculous thing to do of course).
Second, professional athletes are celebrities. Abusing performance enhancing drugs sets a bad example for the kids watching. Because most people playing matchmaking games aren’t celebrities, they aren’t setting a bad example. And anyway, cheating in videogames has no side effects.
> If you think fairness in videogame competitions is frivolous then do not participate in them.
I mostly don’t. But I can spot wasted engineering effort when I see it, and will continue to call it out.
Matchmaking seemed like a neat idea in, like, 2007. In retrospect, it has damaged the industry substantially. All the oxygen has been sucked out of the community server space, etiquette is non-existent, and the aforementioned spyware.