If the hackers are no longer rampantly ruining the game and rendering it effectively unplayable as someone instantly headshots everyone on sight; if the hackers or botters have become indistinguishable from other competent players, then... Well, excellent! Mission Accomplished. All you have remaining is a matchmaking problem, which they're already, separately trying to solve.
(As an aside, we already have games using built in assistance/cheats as an accessibility feature to level the playing field for people using certain hardware or controllers e.g. games with PC and console crossplay, so perhaps there's some approaches and lessons from that which we can apply here as well.)
The only thing at stake then is the integrity of leaderboards or tournament brackets, which is a problem that already had some different, separate approaches to solve. But IMO that a problem is absolutely subservient to the integrity and playability of the base game.
"if the hackers or botters have become indistinguishable from other competent players, then... Well, excellent! Mission Accomplished"
"... that a problem is absolutely subservient to the integrity and playability of the base game."
If you use hacks/cheats to help you play higher than your natural skill/ability, doesn't that ruin the integrity of the game? The mission is not accomplished in this case. Instead it's just tricky to determine who's hacking.
Headshotting everyone on-sight also sounds like the old days of hacks in games. In my experience, there is more nuance to the way these cheats are used these days. Most people aren't trying to be obvious about it.
(As an aside, we already have games using built in assistance/cheats as an accessibility feature to level the playing field for people using certain hardware or controllers e.g. games with PC and console crossplay, so perhaps there's some approaches and lessons from that which we can apply here as well.)
The only thing at stake then is the integrity of leaderboards or tournament brackets, which is a problem that already had some different, separate approaches to solve. But IMO that a problem is absolutely subservient to the integrity and playability of the base game.