Common misconceptions about Easy Anti Cheat and cheating
There's a couple of things I see people repeatedly get wrong about what Easy Anti Cheat (EAC in short) does and how effective it. So I figured I'd waste my Sunday trying to reason with y'all!
"But EAC is useless!"
Far from. It does prevent a bunch of game modifications from working. Most applications it can easily detect and flag, simply because they don't put enough effort into hiding themselves from any anti-cheats. Only a very select few programs have a sufficiently large enough developer team to update their software fast enough to stay ahead of anti-cheat solutions, but that also makes them very expensive.
Most cheats and anti-cheats nowadays have kernel-level access, which means essentially that the application is given full, unrestricted system access. It can do anything, see anything. Big cheat developers are deploying all kinds of means to obfuscate their program's identity, and anti-cheat developers in the meantime analyze these obfuscated identities to create algorithms that can flag such programs.
EAC has a large team behind it constantly updating their algorithms to be able to detect the latest cheat software. This is why cheat software is usually subscription based. Cheat developers have to continuously keep updating their software before anti-cheats are able to detect it. Even if certain teams manage to keep their software under the radar, it jacks up their subscription prices significantly, often charging $5-10 per day, with no guarantee that their software won't get you banned.
"But the game has a lot of cheaters!"
Undeniably there's cheaters in the game. However, some people seem to be very quick with calling someone else a cheater. Ask any server admin how often they end up needing to ban someone due to cheating, and how often a supposed cheater gets reported. From my experience, only about 5% of all accusations end up being valid.
No one knows exactly how many people are secretly using banned modifications, simply because you never know for sure that someone is or isn't. Even server admins sometimes confuse cheaters for legit players, and vice versa. But their assessments are generally really accurate.
Cheat software may be able to obfuscate a program's identity, but they cannot control a player's behavior. There's a bunch of patterns to look for as an admin. There's obvious ones, like trying to shoot players through solid objects, but also less obvious ones, like players randomly skipping certain angles when there's no enemies, or players randomly standing still for a couple of seconds or straight up disconnecting the moment you fly close to them in admin cam.
And of course, there's also some basic statistical analysis that can help. Does the suspect have many kills per minute and few deaths? Are they a low level? Does their Steam profile seem suspicous? But also, is the report coming from a player with a high or low level? Is the suspect in a good position? People also tend to report snipers quite frequently, when they're shooting from far away on off-angles.
Roughly 50% of all accusations I've seen appear to be absolute nonsense. Another 40% I can understand because the suspect is clearly a good player that knows what they're doing, has good aim, but still makes mistakes, like any human. For like 5% I can confidently say they're cheating. For the remaining 5% it's a little hard to tell, generally because a round end cuts our time short and so far we've seen little patterns that fit in either category. We add those players to a watchlist in case they ever rejoin in the future. We only end up needing to ban one cheater per week, roughly.
Some servers have implemented a "!whokilledme" comand (often abbreviated to "!wkm") that allows players to see who last killed them, with what weapon, and what their level, kills, and deaths are. If you suspect you may be killed by a cheater, please use that, and make an informed decision first before screaming in chat that the game is infested with cheaters.