Fundamentally, like with any defense in depth/security system, you need to accept you can't build a solution that stops all cheating, it's all about making the

Fundamentally, like with any defense in depth/security system, you need to accept you can't build a solution that stops all cheating, it's all about making the cost sufficiently high that it's so rare people have an acceptable online gameplay experience most of the time. So at each step, you weigh how much the cost is for the mitigation (in terms of upfront and ongoing dev costs, and player problems), and the benefit (in terms of how much higher you make the barrier). For example, conceptually, you could sell a dedicated machine that requires gov't ID and credit card linked to your account to purchase and melts down if you ever are detected tampering with it, requires a mic and camera on 24/7 to make sure you're not tampering with it once purchased, dies if it loses internet ever once turned on, etc etc, but then nobody is going to buy it because you have made the cost in terms of disruption to players too high for anyone to bother. I'm not sure you can usefully solve it other than trying to keep the barrier for entry higher than a lot of people will bother, and possibly making the barrier much higher for something like ranked play, b/c otherwise, if you do things like if you ever close their DRM after boot, you need to reboot to play the game, you're going to cannibalize your player base, because it's too much of a pain in the ass, and they will (correctly) blame you for this.