The very funny thing about this is that EAC can't even effectively do the singular job that it nominally claims to do. Lost Ark, as an example, is absolutely INFESTED with bots autoleveling characters at all times, filling chat channels with spam for RMT. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were the same for other games.
It is at best a technological solution to a social / socioeconomic problem. The root cause is that the publishers have turned accounts and in-game items into commodities by design. They have fostered an environment where harvesting items in Fortnite, Rocket League, and CS:GO is no different from mining Bitcoin.
Online multiplayer games have always had cheaters, but in the past this could be easily mitigated by server admins laying down the banhammer. And hell, a little cheating can be kinda funny when the game isn't turned into such a long commitment as a 45 minute round of Warzone, or a Tarkov run where you can lose a month's worth of grinding instantly, or some elo score dick measuring contest.
It's not even just that it's a technological solution, it's an automated "solution" that doesn't require much work. The only things developers can do to prevent cheating is writing good server code that doesn't allow players to do insane things. Somehow there are still game developers that do server-authoritative logic client-side. And preventing aim-botting just requires collecting game statistics and banning people (like you mentioned) who are inhumanly good, or making the gameplay more interesting than point-and-click stuff that aim-bots can do. FPS games that are mainly about clicking the enemy should be on their way out. Like piracy and everything else, it's an arms race, but game studios are only making pistols while cheat authors are making rocket launchers.
Personally, my favorite system was the one employed in Sauerbraten. You join a server, and if there are no admins, you can appoint yourself as the admin, change the map, ban any player. It was dead simple, and even though the game had absolutely no server-side gameplay heuristic verification, it was effective. By the time a server has enough players in it to attract trolls, somebody has already claimed the power to evict them. The ban list is emptied once all players leave the server.
The other cool thing about the game was it's online multiplayer map editing mode, where everybody would toggle their cheats on just to fuck around shooting projectiles which could only normally be produced by NPCs. This provided a blow-out valve for the nerds and hackers to flex and one-up each other while there was nothing at stake (If you knew a little bit of C, it was pretty trivial to add a console command to simply kill other players Deathnote style lmao).
I absolutely love games that have lobbies where people can hang out and someone can act as the "gamemaker". Playing games like Halo Infinite or Overwatch now where you go to the main menu after every game is such a soulless system. I think it's done to get people into games quicker, with better ping and balance, and also to reduce harassment that companies have to deal with, but it really makes games very alienating. Gamer nerds can't even make friends playing games anymore!
The very funny thing about this is that EAC can't even effectively do the singular job that it nominally claims to do. Lost Ark, as an example, is absolutely INFESTED with bots autoleveling characters at all times, filling chat channels with spam for RMT. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were the same for other games.
It is at best a technological solution to a social / socioeconomic problem. The root cause is that the publishers have turned accounts and in-game items into commodities by design. They have fostered an environment where harvesting items in Fortnite, Rocket League, and CS:GO is no different from mining Bitcoin.
Online multiplayer games have always had cheaters, but in the past this could be easily mitigated by server admins laying down the banhammer. And hell, a little cheating can be kinda funny when the game isn't turned into such a long commitment as a 45 minute round of Warzone, or a Tarkov run where you can lose a month's worth of grinding instantly, or some elo score dick measuring contest.
It's not even just that it's a technological solution, it's an automated "solution" that doesn't require much work. The only things developers can do to prevent cheating is writing good server code that doesn't allow players to do insane things. Somehow there are still game developers that do server-authoritative logic client-side. And preventing aim-botting just requires collecting game statistics and banning people (like you mentioned) who are inhumanly good, or making the gameplay more interesting than point-and-click stuff that aim-bots can do. FPS games that are mainly about clicking the enemy should be on their way out. Like piracy and everything else, it's an arms race, but game studios are only making pistols while cheat authors are making rocket launchers.
Personally, my favorite system was the one employed in Sauerbraten. You join a server, and if there are no admins, you can appoint yourself as the admin, change the map, ban any player. It was dead simple, and even though the game had absolutely no server-side gameplay heuristic verification, it was effective. By the time a server has enough players in it to attract trolls, somebody has already claimed the power to evict them. The ban list is emptied once all players leave the server.
The other cool thing about the game was it's online multiplayer map editing mode, where everybody would toggle their cheats on just to fuck around shooting projectiles which could only normally be produced by NPCs. This provided a blow-out valve for the nerds and hackers to flex and one-up each other while there was nothing at stake (If you knew a little bit of C, it was pretty trivial to add a console command to simply kill other players Deathnote style lmao).
I absolutely love games that have lobbies where people can hang out and someone can act as the "gamemaker". Playing games like Halo Infinite or Overwatch now where you go to the main menu after every game is such a soulless system. I think it's done to get people into games quicker, with better ping and balance, and also to reduce harassment that companies have to deal with, but it really makes games very alienating. Gamer nerds can't even make friends playing games anymore!