Back in the day we had admins and communities of people. You'd get to know people more and establish trust. You could have registered brackets and independent tournaments with manual administration and banning for cheaters.

It worked pretty good, but all of that was taken away.

> It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days

On that part, we can agree, and if you think I want to 'dismiss the idea' you completely misunderstood the point. My point is, that the cases anti-cheat software tries to solve, are cases that a well-designed game has solved in the beginning (e.g. sending limited game state to clients, discarding impossible input, etc.).

On the other side of the coin, I have seen players who cheated even with anti-cheat in place (like you said), for some games I was unable to play games via proton because the anti-cheat didn't work and I was unable to play some games because the developers messed up their anti-cheat implementation. So there are drawbacks to a feature that has limited use and for which many cases can be solved by other means.

In the end, there are many cheat cases that anti-cheat software can't solve (e.g. using a secondary device) and which have to be solved by other means (e.g. spectator delays, live events, private servers).

> Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days

on the user side, it's perfectly possible if you only play online with your friends.

The whole idea that we should be able to play with random people if we all accept to have a kernel rootkit needs to die. Ultimately that's exactly what the NSA and other agencies want you to support.