Cheating in competitive online games is persistent despite substantial effort and money spent countering it. The reasons are structural.
The fundamental problem
The game runs on the player’s computer, which the player controls entirely. Anything running on hardware you own can be inspected and modified.
Server-side validation catches some things – impossible movement, impossible damage – but cannot detect a player who is simply aiming better than a human could, because the inputs look legitimate.
The categories
Aim assistance, which adjusts your aim towards targets. Detectable statistically over time, and increasingly subtle to avoid that.
Information cheats, which reveal positions you should not see. These are the hardest to detect because they change nothing about your inputs, only your decisions.
And modified game files, which anti-cheat systems check for.
Why the arms race continues
Cheat development is a commercial industry with paying customers. Every detection method is analysed and circumvented, usually within weeks.
Hardware-based cheating – a second device reading the video output and controlling the mouse – defeats software detection entirely, because nothing runs on the gaming machine at all.
What helps
Server-side authority over anything that can be validated. Statistical detection over many matches rather than single instances. Making accounts costly to replace – phone verification, purchase requirements – which changes the economics of being banned.
And investigating reports of high-level players properly, since a small number of cheaters at the top affects the experience of many.
The honest position
Reduction rather than elimination. No competitive game has solved it.