Yeah I'm sure griefers won't mind spending 5$ a month for an extra phone number. This used to be a thing in games I played, I just had a couple extra SIMs for like Ultra & Red Pocket. I'd just jump in their live chat and ask for a change of number any time I got banned.
I think Counter-Strike's most recent title has a separate queue for people who've tied a phone number to the account and maintained a low report ratio that they can join after the account reaches a certain age or something. An approach like that could work. Or we could do something sensible thing and legislate server binaries for multiplayer games be published, bring back community servers, etc.
I swear I'm not passing any judgement here I'm just curious, what's the point of cheating?
Is it fun? I think I would get a kick out of fucking around with the software and making it work but I don't think I'd even use it long enough to get banned.
Getting better at the game more or less. It's one thing to watch replays and try to learn from them, it's on a completely different level when you're able to see what people are doing behind walls all the time in realtime. Saves so much time compared to watching replays, who has time for that? Plus it doesn't stick as well as immediate feedback. After a few dozen hours playing competitively on a particular map with wallhacks, knowing how people generally behave in specific situations gets baked into your brain. Then you turn the wallhacks off and play better, at least that worked for me as a kid. Now I only really play single player shit or things where cheating either doesn't matter or makes the game worse.
Yeah it's weirdly invasive, but on the other hand, most of my enjoyment at the end times of Overwatch the First came from those "your report led to actions against a player" messages, which will now feel even better.
