There's certainly room for improvement on the netcode sometimes (Client-side hit registration is an absolute bone-headed design), but those won't prevent aim bots.
Server-side anti-cheat relies on heuristics and can easily be evaded. At the high level, a highly-skilled player may be indistinguishable from a cheater, so you could easily get false positives.
If the vendors said: Disable anticheat and we’ll block you from tournaments / matchmaking, I’d consider that a feature, not a bug.
If some IRL friend of mine wants to be an asshole and use auto aimers / see through walls to screw with me, then I have ways to deal with it outside the game.
On the other hand, if we both want to run some bullet hell mode + cheats with physics mods and a debugger attached, then what’s the problem?
It’s none of the game developer’s business.
I’m not sure if I am in the minority or majority, but I’m not the only one with this attitude. I suspect the set of people in this boat dwarfs the 5% market share Linux currently has.
They might even get some of us to buy their games if they added support for such a mode. How hard could it be?
When it comes to most competitive games, you're an outlier.
I'm a gamer, and one thing I've learned in my 10+ years reading HN is that there are very few gamers here, and the gamers that are here are a different breed. Significantly less focus on competitive games, more interest in Factorio, and a strong anti-anti-cheat vibe, not to mention pro-Linux. It has certainly created an echo chamber when it comes to gaming-related topics such as anti-cheat.
The average gamer plays apps on their phone btw, not PC games with competitive matchmaking.
At best you can get no-anti-cheat private matches.
It used to be an admin would just kick them. Now we don't get to be in control of our own games.
Cheating is endemic in BR and tactical shooter type games. I remember one f2p game was deleting 50,000 cheater accounts every month.
If the developer's winning $20 per cheater detection, and puts in extra resources when there's more cheaters, the equilibrium ends up a lot better.
And even for free games, I could imagine different ways to tie a monetary stake in in exchange for skipping invasive anticheats.
Blatant cheaters are bad in some ways, but subtle cheat are far worse imo.
The other 'state of the art' which is much cheaper, easier, and essentially impossible to detect on a hardware/equipment level, are the AI-based systems that examine the video and generate inputs via USB, emulating controllers or keyboards and mice. It's a huge problem on console right now and can only be detected via server-side analysis.
Instead of running the game in some arbitrary computer, you'd require players to buy your dedicated hardware, a black box that runs the game and nothing else.
This broke what was otherwise a perfectly normal Battlefield experience. Battlefield 4 requires Punkbuster, although it can run on Linux with no issues. You have to downgrade to an older version though, since EA hasn't updated BF4 to the latest PB AC, which causes you to get kicked.