Solution: submit them for an account ban.

The games that have the most cheating either:

1. don't do account bans

2. don't limit account creation

You can trivially limit account creation by just charging money for the games.

Account bans + community servers don't work either, as the chain of custody for evidence is tainted.

I say consteval was caught cheating on the server I run, and that account should be banned.

Am I, my server's admin, lying?

Probably you need some kind of "court" system. Or maybe if enough dedicated servers say you're cheating, they just ban you.

Yes this is more effort but from the company's perspective they outsource most of the effort to free labor. It can probably be abused if enough admins from different servers band together though.

From a labor exploitation point of view it's really hard to argue that that model is better than kernel-level anticheat.

Exploitation is a strong word. A lot of admins like running servers, and some even make money via ads. This is the case in TF2.

I think free to play is where the market has ended up.

I get it, though, I kind of stopped playing competitive games after it became all about the F2P grind. Even cosmetics-only F2P hits a part of my brain that I try keeping in check. I just play single-player and cooperative games now.

When one enters the career and/or family stage of life, it doesn't make sense to compete against people who have the time commitments of neither. ;)

Yeah, having written that I was thinking about this as well. There's a lot of unpaid labor involved in that model. Maybe, between rootkits and that kind of exploitation of humans, rootkits are the less unjust option.

I'd be curious how many anti-cheat rootkit vendors that there are out there, though. It seems like the sort of industry that consolidation to 3-4 larger, more well-funded vendors would be beneficial in terms of security.

Versus everyone rolling their own or using smaller / cheaper solutions.