I still hold that many of our anti-cheat systems are based on a flawed starting premise for multiplayer games and how competitive and how "fair" they should be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21949201

I have softened on this a bit. I don't think that global/regional ladders are universally bad, I don't have anything against competition as a motivator, and I concede that for some games this is important. But I still think that current multiplayer games place way too much emphasis on global rankings, to the point of ignoring other very common player archetypes. And I still think for most games, the application of player psychology in multiplayer ranking systems and reward systems is shockingly primitive. Multiplayer games are doing a lot of advanced research and complicated work, but they're directing the majority of that work into optimizing in a very narrow direction that nobody ever questions.

Could be a longer conversation, but I am again reminded of the XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/810/

Completely fair games where players across an entire region are stuffed together into a single ladder system -- this is a legitimate design space, but it is a very, very narrow design space catering to what is honestly a kind of niche playerbase, and a lot of games would benefit from taking a broader, more creative view of why the majority of their playerbase is attracted to in the first place.

There are other ways that players could be rated and sorted that would (if not eliminate) at least significantly lessen the need for a lot of these rootkits. In short, if cheaters aren't noticeable, and if the reward structures of a game are such that creating an enjoyable match for all players is more highly rewarded than "winning", then a lot of motivation for the kind of destructive cheating that ruins current experiences would go away. But more importantly, a lot of the kind of cheating that would remain: griefing, hacking, and generally destructive, mean-spirited behavior -- that kind of cheating would become much easier to detect and its detection could be better grouped together with moderation of other destructive player behaviors that may not constitute cheating, but that are still annoying enough that you already should be searching for and banning them anyway.

Of course in some situations you have to try and guarantee completely fair experiences, and in some situations the purely competitive aspect of the game is the only part of the experience that matters. But the games industry currently treats it like it's a given that purely fair, region-wide competition should be the primary motivator for almost everyone playing multiplayer games, and honestly I just don't see it. The games industry is obsessed with something that is niche, most players don't want to try and work their way up a global competitive ladder beyond the impulse they have to unlock rewards and see a number increase. Many of those players want to win >50% of their matches, they want to be matched up against people who play interesting strategies rather than purely competitive ones, they want to play against people who force them to think and experiment, they want a constantly shifting meta where a dominant strategy doesn't very quickly become the only strategy, they want difficulty spikes to come in waves rather than randomly, when trying out new strategies they want to be able to slowly ramp into them, they want opponents to be playful and to try "fun" things during games.

Ladder systems for most games are not designed to encourage those behaviors or outcomes.

I am seriously skeptical that the majority of players in most multiplayer games today actually care about the integrity of ladders more than the other issues I raise above, and I wonder if this focus on fairness at all costs is a mentality that the games industry is going to eventually grow out of and look back on with the same kind of embarrassment as we already do with many other generally accepted practices in the past that were never questioned.