On the flipside of this, I've been kicked from games because I know how to prefire, and a lot of players see that and just assume you're wallhacking. Nobody pays attention to the 70% of the time that you prefire at air, but when you guess right and instakill someone holding an angle, it's easier to say "cheater" than "i've been holding this same angle for the past 5 rounds, perhaps I've become predictable"

It's basically luck of the draw with trust factor and region

I regularly run into cheaters who I watch the demo afterwards and they just sit there aim locked onto someone and tracking them through the wall for 10s before blasting them without ever seeing them, or react to things they can't see (e.g. suddenly flick to a corner someone is walking up to in a panic wo seeing or hearing a thing). Basically every other game has someone suspicious if not blatantly cheating from the start. If was bad in CSGO and it's 10x worse in CS2

Most cheaters are good at hiding it.

What is your playtime? Mine is pretty low on CS2 but the biggest critics on the game online are the amount of cheaters.

People used to form "gaming-clans" in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.

Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they're worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.

server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.

By which information? I have no clue what Northstar is, but if you ban by IP or MAC, its pointless.

There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.

A global ban system without a more nuanced approach is a terrible idea. Operators of that global ban system will whitelist themselves, blacklist people they hate, and maybe even backdoor the mod that enables them to ban people in the first place. Server admins have no choice but to either opt into the entire system or have none at all, and both of these options suck. We've seen how this plays out already.

Score players by your own criteria, weight everything with different blacklists, greylists and whitelists, etc. and ban players if they exceed a threshold automatically. It won't be perfect, but email catches most spam emails that way just fine.

I thought they stopped doing this during half life alyx?

Oh did I mix up those two? I was actually referring to VAC, need to check who is responsible for EAC.

Edit: Apparently its Epic, I will correct the beginning post.

Giving cheat authors instant feedback in terms of detection results in cheats getting better at evading detection more quickly.

This is standard practice in anti-cheat methodology, and is generally agreed upon to result in much more positive long-term outcomes.

This is for paid cheats. If you ban in waves the companies selling cheats lose a larger sum of money all at once. This also hits right at the time when they need to put in the most work.

I doubt that, I mean show me a proper working anti cheat which isn't deeply rooted into the system as this Valorant bullshit? Don't even know how good that one is actually working. I just think there should be more focus from players and general attention that cheaters are bad for sales, because people don't want to spend money on games where cheaters are free to prevail.

I also think with CS2 Valve has a big motivating factor to make this classic one which is cheater free. Also why aren't third party games able to use VAC?

I really like the community driven moderation of playerbase is a good suggestion. For games like Hunt: Showdown and any other game with just lobbies, its not working though.

Hear, hear.

Quick disclaimer, I've been involved with FOSS shooters for something like 20 years now. I mention that to establish where I come from: in a FOSS game anybody can modify the game client all they want, so all the bullshit is out of the way from the start. You can't hide behind make-believe notions such as "they can't modify the client" – which is one of the major lies and fallacies of commercial close-source games. If there's something you don't want the client to know or do, you make it so on the server.

There is a lot of things that the server can do that can severely limit cheater shenanigans. If you don't want them to see through walls then don't tell them what's behind walls. If you don't want them to know what's behind them then don't tell them what's outside their cone of view. If you don't want them to teleport look where they were a moment ago and where they claim to be now and figure out if it should be possible. You get the idea.

Aimbots can be detected because at the core it's a simple issue of the client's aim snapping from one place to the target too fast. What's "too fast" and the pattern of the movement can be up for debate but it can definitely be detected and analysed and reviewed in many ways – regular code, AI, and human replay.

If this kind of analysis is too much for your server to perform in real time (it was too much, 20 years ago) then you can store it and analyse it offline or replay it for human reviewers. You can fast-parse game data for telltale signs, analyse specific episodes in detail, and decide to ban players. Yes it happens after the game was ruined but at least it happens.

There are a couple of types of cheating that you can't detect server side:

• Modifications to the client HUD that help the player grok information faster and better. This is a large category that can include things like colorblindness overlays, font changes, UI changes, movement tracking on display etc. As far as I'm concerned that falls under HUD modding and should be welcome in any healthy game. Again, if you don't want clients to have a piece of information don't give it to them, and design your game in a way that such mods are mostly irrelevant.
• Automating input. Again a large category that includes macros that speed up complex chains of operations. Can be slowed down by imposing server-side delays but you can hurt legit fast players this way too. Same as above, if this is what makes or breaks your shooter then perhaps you should rethink it.

Some of the most fun games I've seen did not care about HUD mods and macros and on the contrary embraced them. You want to write a macro that will auto-purchase the best gear based on your available coin after respawn? Knock yourself out, because what constitutes "best" gear changes depending of the circumstances, and a veteran with a pistol can smoke your ass anyway if you don't know how to properly use that fancy plasma gun.

I've mentioned human review above which brings up an interesting feature that I don't see implemented in enough games: saving and replaying game metadata. It's stupidly simple to store everything that happened during a match on the server side and it doesn't take much space. You can offer that recording to seasoned players to replay on their PC which allows them to see the match from any player's point of view. An experienced veteran can notice all kinds of shenanigans this way – and it's also an excellent e-sport and machinima feature that enables commentary, editing, tutorials and so on.

Edit: Oh, forgot one thing. You may be wondering, then why don't the big game companies do all this? Simple, cost. Why should they pay for server juice and staff to review games properly when they can slap a rootkit on your computer and use your resources?