This reminds me of a discussion around 2 decades ago, where someone showed a picture of his "undetectable aimbot" for a turn-based artillery game: a ruler, a page of charts, and a handheld calculator; followed by a copious amount of discussion of whether that was considered cheating.

How exactly will it stop cheats? Any skill based game can still be cheated. Just analyze the video stream, or go even lower tech, point a camera at your screen. Many games can be effectively cheated like this. For eaxmple Aimbots in counter strike and peak human reflexes in dota/lol.

If the server says "there are footsteps from these coordinates" then it's telling the client there's a person at these coordinates.

Due to latency, the client has to at least do a little prediction.

Maybe, but I think that would've been done already if it was feasible.

The storage read, memory bandwidth, load computation, and gamethred pause to add the object to the game world is far more expensive than sending a move.

In certain competitive environments framerate is definitely limited. Here [0] are the rules for Fallout 4 any% speed runs, framerate must be capped at 60FPS. AFAIK that rule applies to all games in this engine due to physics behavior. I don't follow tournament FPS games, but it wouldn't shock me if there are rules for competitive play there as well.

If you are asking why games like counterstrike don't have limits on online play, that's mostly a commercial question. Would those games be as popular if they limited performance to what was achievable for minimum specs? I certainly wouldn't want to play at 1920x1080 on my nice widescreen monitor, but setting the minimum to a $1500 monitor and the hardware to drive it would guarantee very few players.

[0] https://www.speedrun.com/fallout_4?h=Any-Full-game&rules=gam...

Edit:typo

Yeah and in real world people from different countries with vastly different economic backgrounds compete on the same stage, I think video games are fine.

This isn't exclusive to video games. Much of the improvements to world records in sports are due to improvements in gear, yet we don't consider those records to have been unfairly achieved.

Some games do impose limits though, for example Overwatch doesn't allow you to use an aspect ratio larger than 16:9 and selecting a wider aspect ratio actually cuts down on your vertical field-of-view rather than granting you more horizontal field-of-view. This lessens the potential advantage of ultra-wide monitors.

How would consoles be any more immune to computer vision based cheating? Instead of feeding the output to a spoofed keyboard & mouse, you'd just be feeding it to a controller input. I'm not really seeing any difference in technical challenge here, and you wouldn't even need esoteric hardware since console controllers are USB devices anyways.

Someone doesn’t know about the chronus zen or how big console cheating is!

Let’s just say that my finals experience isn’t the same as yours! ;)

They are often more convenient and secure. If you don't mind a single-purpose device that severely limits your ability to modify your experience. Better is subjective after all.