It's pretty effective actually, this is why they do ban waves.
replyOne of my friends in high school used to cheat on a popular video game. The fact ban waves would occur about once a week to once a month meant whenever his accounts got banned, he never knew why exactly and wasn't able to stop it the next time.
Of course, if ban waves are too long apart then yeah you're just letting a known cheater wreak havoc on the playerbase.
But the price of a new account is low. So worst case cheaters can cheat on the playerbase for a couple weeks get banned and then switch to another account and continue cheating for another couple weeks.
replyThat's the problem with many older games, I don't know of a good solution other than either age-gating accounts or keeping the price of the game ~$60
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