I'd rather just give Riot Games my driver's licence than full access to my computer. They already know my name and where I live from metadata.

There should be a KYC solution for gaming where a company like Epic, Riot, or Valve verifies your identity and developers can gate competitive video games behind that. If you cheat, you're out for 5-10 years (so dumb teenagers aren't locked out forever). The big issue imo isn't banning cheaters, it's preventing them from creating a new account and cheating again.

Such a system would be free money & low maintenance for whatever company develops it first.

What even makes you think it's a solvable problem? Even with a totally cryptographically controlled end-to-end hardware chain that treats the player like an adversary/inmate (like in the consoles, maybe even more strict) there's always a possibility of ML-based cheats with a low-latency camera. Barely anyone does that now because there are easier methods, but trust me, it will get used if required, just like DMA is used now. People already throw crazy money into cheating.

It's a race to the bottom where everybody eventually loses except the corporations. Players never get rid of the cheaters completely, unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers, and corpos obtain the ultimate vendor lock.

The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.

If your solution is bad, it doesn't deserve to work. Find something else.

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.

My account is 20 years old. And has several games with hundreds of hours including a couple of perfect games, not to mention a hundred or more games. Also phone verified. I don't expect everyone to have similar accounts, but it's seldom I'm matched against anything even remotely similar, say 5 year old accounts with similar playtimes in non-F2P games, though many profiles are private, which itself is - I think - also suspicious since virtually everyone leverages aliases on Steam so I can't really imagine a case for this other than obscuration, though I'm certain some people do it for privacy reasons I expect that rationale is rare.

Beyond that I would say there are a lot of suspicious individuals I've been matched against in both premier and comp . Regardless of whether or not they're smurfs it makes MM obnoxious if only because you end up matched against people who rage and ruin 45m-1h of your time by competing illicitly.

The MM algo is also just shit without these considerations lumped on top of it. I regularly play with my friends who rank lower and that draws my rank down so we get matched in low ranks, resulting in violent pubstomping. Of course I play on my only account, so I'm sure I get hackusated a lot, which would ostensibly get my trust factor drug through the mud. I suppose that's a solid incentive for smurfing on its own, especially since the system is opaque.

It's all pretty bad, frankly. Faceit is hardly better, a lot of the community is pretty toxic and obnoxious salty tryhard metabangers that aren't fun to play with.

On an evolutionary level, the purpose of play is to improve your skill in something in a tight, enjoyable feedback loop. Cheating messes with that.

Though your approach is preferable, I do think cheating (or more broadly, not trusting that you can learn how to improve with further play) kneecaps the whole point of playing.

(I'm badly presenting an idea I learned from Jonathan Blow re: how some game design ideas, such as opaque adaptive difficulty like rubberbanding found in racing games, destroys the purpose of playing)

Point being that a ”subtle hacker” might be subtle to some and obvious to others. So OP, being a newbie with only 6 mo of experience, might suspect someone being subtle about their hacking but they might be very blatant to a more experienced player.

The problem is, it's gotten hard to do drivers for custom hardware on macOS as a result for everything that can't be done with libusb as a result - and it's also gotten harder to patch over deficiencies of macOS.

You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an OS that is secure from cheaters, software pirates and malware at the same time. Android is the best example - either you run an OS that passes Play Integrity/SafetyNet and is blessed by Google and thus can use games, Netflix, banking or a whole lot of other apps that require non-rooted phones these days, but you lose e.g. the ability to do an actual full-device backup, or you run a phone that's rooted or runs a custom OS (say, aftermarket once the manufacturer ceases providing even security updates) but you lose out on about 2/3rds of apps because they just refuse to run.