The anti-cheat problem is long-running and complicated. If you choose not to run anti-cheat because you understand that these are opaque rootkits, good for you! That's a totally, 100% valid choice. But please keep in mind:
- you are a tiny minority and not the target customer
- online multiplayer games are an absurdly big business (i.e. there are huge incentives here)
- no, you can't completely solve this server side
- elite players are insanely good - they are by definition outliers, so looking for statistical outliers is not in itself a solution
- game companies are highly incentivized to work with (or at least not antagonize) the elite players (so just throwing them in matches with cheaters is not a solution)
- the stakes are high both for the devs and their users, so "pretty good" anti-cheat is usually insufficient
You can sum things up by saying that kernel-level anti-cheat DRM is the worst solution, except for all of the other solutions.
I hope to see more discussion on possible solutions and tradeoffs - this is a challenging technical problem whose solution (if there is one) is fairly valuable.
I hope to see more discussion on possible solutions and tradeoffs - this is a challenging technical problem whose solution (if there is one) is fairly valuable.
[edit: hopefully fixed the tone, per feedback]