The burden should be on the developers and a server side solution. No PC should be invaded with software to stop cheating. It's cat and mouse anyway with client side detection, by chasing it so hard they are just incentivizing the creation of less and less detectable cheats.

The whole "its an untampered system" thing doesnt work. It's like Secure Boot now randomly being required in games. No user should have to enable or disable anything like that just to run a game. It's their device, they should have the freedom to do what they want and still run an application.

I think the invasion of bots in games is ruining them personally, no matter how old I get, or how bad I get at them, I still want to play against real players. I wouldnt mind a mode with just AI for people, but they should never be mixed in with real players.

It really is as simple as "don't trust the client." Just assume that everyone is trying to cheat and go from there.

Servers should know what valid inputs from clients look like, and aggressively validate and profile those inputs for cheating. Meanwhile, the server should only send data to the client that is needed to render a display. Everything else stays server-side.

The key is to build a profile of invalid activity, like inhumanly fast mouse velocity coupled with accurate kills. There's an art to this, but for things like FPS games, the general envelope of valid user activity should be straightforward to define. The finer points get caught during QA, and then further refined post-release. Someone might even come up with a library for this if there isn't one already.

As a bonus, this also catches situations where people are using kernel circumvention like external hardware, in order to cheat. The behavior as seen by the server is what ultimately gets flagged.

Some things are harder, but for starters a few ideas:

• Either check that the reported positions of players, their movement speed, etc are consistent to what the game would allow you to do (don't fly, don't go faster, don't go through walls,...) or only accept player input, process it server side and then send positions etc back to the client. (You can do some local interpolation, but the server wins, when there's a miss match). That should get rid of flying, no clip, teleportation, evasion of projectiles, ... You can also analyze the inputs for abnormal behavior like the precision with which you aim for the (center of) the head, aiming through walls, etc.

• Do all hitscan and projectiles etc. server side. Never let clients report that they're hitting other players. This is calculated on the server.

• Do only report other player positions when they're on screen or almost on screen. If the client doesn't know where the enemies are, wallhacks are impossible or harder (note that some information may be transferred to the client for the sake of spatial audio etc!)

And so on. Do not, never ever, rely on client side data or validation. If a cheat program can alter the client, it can alter the data it sends. How do you ensure, that the client is actually official and "your code", when it can tell you anything it wants to tell you? You can only make it harder for others to impersonate your client, but never impossible. Especially on PC, when you can execute just about any code you want?

Machine learning. Oh this player did this impossible move more than once, maybe we should flag that.

Valve have been doing it for more than a decade. Now imagine what others could do, they are so caught up on "AI", but wont try to use it for anything it could actually be useful for.