> filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games
FWIW, the easiest way to dispel the fallacies pumped out by these individuals is to ask how much time they've sunk into a reasonably contemporary competitive online game. I almost never meet people who have these delusions about anticheat being ineffective that also has actually invested significant (>500) hours into the games that they're appropriate for.
(people who work with spam and fraud/abuse prevention also usually don't have these delusions, because the underlying economics are similar. turns out that actually having experience with a thing is enough to disillusion most people of stupid ideas about that thing, who know?)
Counter. As a group of 4 dota players who are software engineers, we have a collective 20k hours.
All of us refuse kernel level anti cheat.
Dota overwatch is the best we have available for anti cheat. It's better than kernel level anti cheat
Dota isn't a very cheatable game to begin with. Even with the best micro you can't reach a high elo without the appropriate high level planning skills.
If we look at a game like Rust it's impossible for it to exist without a kernel anti-cheat today
"effective" and "solved" are too easily conflated, here. Consoles have the solution, if you enforce hardware attestation then you reduce the attack surface to people using XIM, Cronus and other detectable exploits. When you allow PCIe/ReBAR, hypervisors, custom bootloaders, custom mobo firmware, third-party hardware drivers, firmware macros, lagswitches, and whitelist process injection, people will always exploit you. Cheating is inherent to the architecture of PC gaming.
Ring 0 anticheat is a mitigation, and just one step down the road of enforcing fairness. The goal of erasing cheaters quickly becomes a Procrustian bed that alienates fair players and funds cheat developers, there's nothing that gamedevs can do client-side to solve this problem without redefining how PC gaming works. Out of all the games I've put 500+hrs into, votekick is the only working anticheat that I've encountered.
The only competitive game I’ve put serious hours into that had votekick was CS, and teams would almost never kick their own cheaters, even when they were obvious, because they wanted that sweet Elo.