What would you sacrify to improve anti cheat?

In-built software like that (WoW's Warden, Valve's VAC) and statistical tools looking at data are the only two options that are ever really likely to work effectively.

Unfortunately the prior is probably too expensive for PS2 and they seem reticent about the latter.

I wouldnt mind having anti-cheat scanning software on my PC if it helped reduce the number of hackers.
I also wouldnt mind donating some money to hire to someone to track down the people behind these hacking sites, and remove their arms/eyes.

Either way would be satisfactory.

well in their shoes i would get anti-cheat scan programs made that downloaded through the launcher as asset files that would unpack and install silently and identify as standard DRM software that all systems use in the registry and any other identifiers. have em scan the user's systems randomly and send a notification to the game company on detection of cheats to be put on a master ban list to be used in ban waves. then have the program remove itself automatically after scanning to prevent hackers from discovering the scan program by chance.

as for authors of hack programs can't they just play the shell game and make anyone interested in hunting them down piss away time and money mapping out the network of fake companies to try and trace them?

Ive had an idea for hackers.
(warning random thoughts follow, take your pitchforks elsewhere)

Hackers are identified but not banned.
Upon their next login the hackers are teleported to what appears to be the normal world, accept it isnt, its a world full of bots and AI.
The hackers are never the wiser and continue to slay 1000s of AI players thinking they are doing their usual 'ruin the fun for everyone routine'.
Throw in a few randomly generated hate tells to help the illusion.

Of course youd have to do a ridiculously good job with the AI etc to be convincing, but the middle finger to hackers potential is quite high.

I also had the idea of simply telporting them to a blank environment with nothing at all in it, just black space, no lighting, nothing. That would be funny. Dont ban hackers, just put an instant teleport to black server stamp on their accounts.

Or teleport them to a server that just shows the blue screen of death constantly, lol, they think theyve crashed.

My thought are probably way beyond the outer limits, but funny to think about.

Privacy.

How precisely would it identify cheat software? As a programmer, I can tell you that this is not as easy as it seems. It is possible to create (an extremely easy to detect) that will, say... refill ammo on a gun every 5 rounds fired. Now, the player has infinite ammo. I will not discuss names of software here, nor techniques, but the moment more rounds then possible per magazine have been fired, that will send up red flags within their system. Even so, it will most likely take hours at the absolute fastest for a ban to go through. In a free to play game, just create another account. Post patch, this takes ~a few minutes of fiddling around with things to update the hack.

The is possible due to the clientside computation of things such as how much ammo a player has, magazine size, etc - this is easy to manipulate. The server literally cannot keep up with gameplay in a scheme that forces validation for every action, many guns fire at a rate faster then a round per 90ms, which means that players with the best ping outrun the server's ability to keep up with processing due to connection quality, and the bandwidth / connection speed required would be immense.

Really, sometimes I think a good partial solution would simply to push a small .exe update every day to force the cheats to update everything every 24 hours. It wouldn't eliminate cheating, but it would raise the price of hack tools tremendously, and free ones would probably all but disappear due to the work required to keep things updated. Punting everyone daily for a new patch would, however, be obnoxious as heck.

I'm not a programmer and i don't presume it to be easy. but i would set it up to make the scan process hard to detect and self delete so the chance of hackers finding the program and tampering with it was lowered.

i like the idea of forcing hackers to update their programs every update, but then again if it's every update what is to stop a hacker from tampering with the launcher to isolate the updates and reverse engineer them quickly? you'd annoy the ones that make their own for their own use into stopping but the paid ones would still be motivated since they profit from their work.

since the game is FTP getting a ban only means you loose equipment you've unlocked and can start again if you desire.

You gave up privacy the moment you plugged your of up to your router.

So called Dolphins, who are in fact often cheaters themselves.

I'm not sure sacrifying privacy would defeat hackers. They would simply crack their client, use a home made tool with a particular name not part of the list, or spoof their app id with another (you don't want ps2 to shut down the "hack application" explorer.exe!).

More on randomness. Removing random pattern on guns is removing the cheater's favorite, unbeatable excuse (i had 5 hs on you because i got lucky! gitgud!).

Now without random pattern, the server can start to record suspicious behavior on demand and cut the stats.

Let's say you have a weapons with a recoil of 5 units up, 10 units right and 10 units left. If the stats show the guy managed to get each bullets exactly at the heads. He must be either a robot. Or he's using aimbot. With the current random mecanics, The pellets are slightly deviated, such that it obfuscate the aiming cheat.

But without random pattern, how the less skilled players can have a chance to beat the bests?
What if the game allowed critical hits? There's no much diference, out of cheating environnement, between a random stray of fire favoriting 5 pellets right into the enemy, and one bullet being crit hitting the guy 5x harder. But the key difference here is, crits unlike random can be attributed by the server, so if a cheater force a crit on another, the server can cut this information with it's own recorded.

Did the server allowed the potential cheater to crit? If yes, he's lucky, if no, he's caught!

Hopefully this would mean Paying players are no longer exempt from permanent bans (based on my observational experience of some cheaters on Cobalt), since if the population remains strong enough the money no longer matters... as much.

I'm already dual subscribing two MMO's, it would be a first step by DBG to keep me paying for a less BS gameplay experience, partly which is caused by a select few freeloaders that choose to spoil it for the whole community, because they can keep reloading new accounts. (And those that are paying and spoiling it, like it stands now, they can definitely still ****).

I like how "Gee Tee Ef Oh" is censored.

If the cheater already uses a method that makes a convincing number of kill shots land on target, removing randomness and trying to track cheaters based on the accuracy he is already demonstrating really isn't going to help. That's just removing randomness despite the initial logic of why the randomness was included.

That sounds like an irrelevant point. Unless the cheat tried to force crits, and instead just made a convincing number of the bullets get on target, you'd have made no progress.
(Besides, the cheats already allow attacking players without establishing proper line of sight on them. 1 bullet with the power of 5 wouldn't matter if you couldn't get a bead on the cheater to begin with.)

It's a bad one.
No idea what went wrong there.

At least they are forced to low down their hack and take some hits - right now the randomness is such a powerful cover they doesn't need to take risks.

Without random the cheaters would have to put more random from their own tool to look convincing, so basically, they are closer in skill than the no cheaters to stay credible, compared to the current state where with game random doing the convincing and argumentative job for them, they don't need to tweak false-random, and you cannot call them for that.
Now if they can just prop damage in a noclip/no direction manner it's something that need to be added in the server double check - record players directions, position and bullet traces.

This goes back to my intial point. Despite your initial explanation, and its follow-up, I don't understand why our cheater would need to increase randomness in response to the removal of randomness in shot implementation. (For that matter, what kind of randomness are we removing? cone of fire, or the variability of the amount of rise or jerk in a weapon's recoil?) If the ideal is a player that has the fire control to hover their reticle over the target over extended fire, i.e., lands shots on a target reliably, any kind of cheat detection that looks for "landing shots on targets reliably" is going to end up flagging un-augmented good players. In fact, that's what happened when they rolled out the passive auto-kick recently - it got so many false positives that they had to increase the tolerance.

The aggregate randomness is already something a good hack attempts to emulate. Getting rid of the imposed randomness just changes the algorithms but not the goal of the algorithms or what the ideal looks like.

The resolution of that data would be classic server-side hit ballistics calculations, the stress of which is exactly what clientside is intended to mitigate in the first place. Granted, you could find ways to partition a smaller subset of players - those that are suspect, for example - to run on it but that still means that subset is going to have to be able to run around ruining other people's days until the trigger is reached and they are "suspect" and are monitored.

Horizontal and vertical random recoil values, cone of fire - shooting at a wall to see how random it goes.
So what's going to change between a random and non random official accuracy game if the player use a semi random cheating tool?

In a non random game, it'll be harder for the cheater to explain how he filled his killboard without having to resort to a streamed justification showing it playing (with the hand). If a legit can pull perfect muscle microskill for every different weapons with their own recoil patterns, good for him/her. Esp cheats will still happens, but with a lower, less ridiculous impact, as in a skill system resorting to humane condition, there's a limit at how much you can pretend to be good

However, in a random backed game, he/she can fill pages of kills with HS, and you'll always have someone or even part you relativising that he/she great luck proccing most or even all of its shots, because law of probability allow that kind of pattern to happens even if the odd is extremely low, there's no limit in this setup at how far you can cheat and launder it on luck.

Headshots.

In TF2 only one class (well one other with via an unlock) can headshot. Guess what all the aimbots play.

That's the idea. Paying members with $14.99 x # months played + DBC purchased and spent are not likely to cheat and risk their investment.

Cheating will still happen, but the whines from it will be delicious to see.