Actually, spoken as someone who has played his fair (1000h+) share of Counter Strike Global Offensive since it came out.

1. Is and always was rare. During all my time on official matchmaking servers I encountered maybe one or two raging spinbots per year tops. I don't know if this is region dependent, I always play on EUW.

2. Again, how do you know? Do you watch the whole demo after the game to judge wether someone was cheating all along or do you just go "he just couldn't have known I was here, he must be cheating"? If they raise through the ranks and "ruin" games along the way, how is it not blantant enough to cause an ban?

Besides, I don't know much about the fow in those large-map royale type games, but why does the server even sent every other players position to the client? Hiding as much info as possible from the client from the start is like anticheat 101 and in most cases much, much easier than trying to get the players computer to disobey him. In Counter Strikes case, player positions are only sent to the client if they have to be, based on how the maps parts are attached to each other iirc.

> Not to mention other perverse incentives - the "smurfing" impulse many cheaters have, where they will abandon the account as soon as it gets to a high enough rank go be even remotely competitive. They just create a new account

There is two parts to this. The first is the smurfing problem, which I personally find the most annoying thing in competitive matchmaking based videogames to date. In regular sports, when someone joins who is much better, you could always just say "fuck this, I'm leaving", but in competitive games only you are punished for leaving and the other guy gets to abuse you for the duration of the match. I have yet to see effective counter measures against this and I doubt there will be any soon. It is a legitimate player after all, there is no real reason to ban him since bad intention can rarely be proven. Many people abandon their accounts for months, get back worse and climb the ranks again afte swiftly resharpening their hibernated skills. Note however that smurfing has nothing to do with cheating -- it's generally just players who misuse the ranking system for their own amusement while destroying the fun for others.

The second part falls under the same catergory as my original first point. It doesn't really matter if the cheater is banned or just gets bored and makes a new account. This is directly correlating with the friction of creating new accounts and it's not an anticheat problem. Back in the day when CS:GO still cost money, there where waves of new smurfs and generally trolling or annoying (and yes, people I would suspect of cheating as well) players after every steam sale when the game would be sold a neglectible amount of money. Now it's a lot better since new accounts are distrusted by default and require a lot of effort to get into a trusted state where normal matchmaking is even available, dramatically reducing the number of throwaways due to the sheer amount of effort of creating a new competitive account.

So this problem is nothing that couldn't be reduced to neglectable amounts if the makers of the game cared enough to properly filter new accounts.

> Banning an account wrongly is also very costly.

Yes, I'm not sure how this is related to the discussion. If you ban my account because I looked up what cheats are available for a game, sent my entire browser history to the mothership to throw it against some domain blacklist and ban my account based on that I'd be pissed as well. False positives are nothing an invasive anticheat system wouldn't have.

> Cheaters are generally people looking for a quick hit. They are not the type of people who will spend days or have the knowledge to setup whatever complicated _technically_ possible but difficult workaround. Making it difficult to install, buy or use cheats easily is an effective deterrent.

I have never even once heard of a cheater who programmed his own cheat for a game and inteded to actually use it for competitive matches himself. There are two types of people, and both are highly sophisticated:

The first type creates cheat for shits and giggles. He does not intend to actually use them beyond proving that they indeed fall through the filters.

The other type is a professional cheat publisher. He has the expertise, often publishes for multible games accross genres and offers personalized cheating systems on a subscription basis. The people willing to use the cheat will follow every given instruction, even stuff like rebooting windows into recovery to install unsigned drivers and things like that. They have no idea what harm this can do to their systems and they don't care because they are not techincal and don't need to be. It's a pure service economy, and not even an illegal one.

Source: I had a friendish guy for some years who eventually had his account banned because he stopped installing updated versions of a cheat and eventually got caught when VAC got onto the older one. Everyone who played with him had no idea he was a cheater until that moment, he just hit some crazy shots from time to time, sometimes while he was high on weed. Enemies didn't know nor complain, neither did we. It was indistinguishable to a high-skill player.

> It's really a very difficult problem.

Yes, but I'm convinced Valve solves this with great brilliance.

Next time you tell someone he has no idea what he's talking about, please consider you might be wrong.