Is the main problem with cheaters that it's unfair, or that it feels unfair/ruins the experience?

Because if you force all the cheaters to hide well enough to look like "normal" players, no one will know, and the game feel will not be negatively impacted. Outside of the tippy top of competition where money becomes involved, it's kind of irrelevant if the game is technically fair, as long as it feels fair to everyone.

> Also many players don't need to cheat all the time; just in that critical moment when it really matters. Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually guaranteed win? Something like that probably applies to a many people and fields. This is even harder to detect with just statistics.

The difference is that IRL chess and a typical FPS game have very different availability of datasets. IRL chess has both fewer moves per game, and fewer games played in short succession than typical FPS games. Also, with FPS games there is a single metric to evaluate -- the shot landed or missed -- compared with chess where moves are ranked on a scale.

So I'd argue that it would be much easier to do a statistical model to predict a cheating aimbot than it would a cheating IRL chess player. I don't believe Magnus's proposition holds for prolific online chess players when they do dozens or more blitz/bullet games in a single day.

  Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually guaranteed win

If we are thinking of the same quote, iirc he said all he needs is a prompt from computer "there is a winning move here"

> Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually guaranteed win?

That's because he's an elite chess player. Him cheating once per game could make the difference between being number 1 or number 10 but either way he's up there.

But for you or me, cheating once per game wouldn't make a difference. We'd still be ranked as nobody plebs. To get ranked high enough for people to know our names we would have to cheat dozens of times a game, and experienced players would easily peg us as cheaters.

Try cheating on chess.com, if you cheat enough to make a meaningful difference their servers will automatically nail you with statistics.

The problem is that most cheaters don't just go full aimbot and track people through walls. That is a surefire way to make sure your account gets reported, reviewed, and banned regardless of what anti-cheat is in place.

Serial cheaters cheat just enough to give themselves an edge without making it obvious to the people watching them. By just looking at their stats, it can become very difficult (though not impossible) to differentiate a cheater from a pro player. This difficulty increases the odds of getting a false positive, necessitating a higher detection threshhold to avoid banning innocent players.

Valve has adapted this kind of thing in Counter Strike for almost a decade.

They try to make own matchmaking for possible statistical outliers so cheaters end up playing against each other. Of course, real good players can still get there and there are (at least used to) real humans on reviewing on those games to see if someone is actually a cheater. It is not a simple task, since you can cheat to be just slightly better than others and that is enough to be good.

This post is so interesting because it highlights the people that don't know anything about the requirements or state of cheats/anticheat. What you're describing is 10 years out of date. Every modern cheat has a toggle, and (almost) every modern cheater masks augmented behavior with misses/native behavior.

Good players are statistical outliers. False positives are hard to avoid with this kind of approach.

I suppose Valve, who trained a neural network to detect/ban cheaters exhibiting unnatural behavior.

Any company that makes big money on long-living multiplayer games?

It would not only take a lot of developer resources, but also computing power.