> Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary.
That silly "speed of light" thing? Just design better.
And some cheats happen on a different device. There is no way anti-cheat software can defeat those (even eye trackers are not perfect).
The design question is about software that abuses the game state, which is sent to the client, but not displayed to the player (e.g. wall-hacks), and software that sends impossible input (e.g. speed hacks). Anything that manipulates mouse input is very hard to counter.
In the end, all the technical solutions have limits and you need other means to solve the issue (e.g. play with friends/live events). However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client).
> However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client).
And now you can't provide client-side prediction between packets, so you get movement stutter all over the place instead of occasional updates and you get somebody popping into existence because they were behind a wall occlusion on your last packet and you've now strafed into line-of-sight. And they got theirs before you did, so you're dead.
Winning, winning result.
Consider perhaps that the people making this stuff aren't stupid and would try such obvious things if they were practical.
That silly "speed of light" thing? Just design better.