I think you are downplaying how often you will run into cheaters even if they are rare.
Here is a great post about it, the math is outdated because OW is 5v5 instead of 6v6 now, but it’s a great post that explains this.
What people don’t realize is just how commonplace cheating actually is in gaming.
If you believed 99% of players don’t cheat, then, statistically, 10.5% of all your games of Overwatch would contain at least 1 cheater.
What? That seems crazy! How can that be true?!
Simple: Probability. Imagine you flip a coin 1x… what are the odds you get Heads? Easy: 50%. What if you flipped the coin 11 times instead… now what are the odds at least one Heads popped up? 99.95%
This is exactly the problem with cheating: even if only 1% of players cheat, there are still 11 other players in each and every match you play. Therefore, the odds that no one is cheating is 89.5%… which means the odds at least 1 person is cheating would be 10.5%.
This is why game developers never release detailed information about cheating in their games. Instead, they make purposely-vague announcements like: “Hey guys! We banned 20,000 players over the last 6 or 7 months.” - This gives the impression the developer is ‘doing something’ without actually allowing us to figure out how big the problem is. Is 20,000 players over 6 months a lot? How many games were affected? We don’t know because they don’t tell.
There are a few studies on the internet of how many players cheat in video games. One such study - a poll of 9,436 adults (5,911 of which were gamers) - discovered that 1 to 5 percent of players admit to “Always” using cheats when playing multiplayer games online. If true, it would mean that 10.5 to 43 percent of your Overwatch matches contain a cheater.
Some people would say that number is too high, but the fact is most cheats are designed with the intent of being extremely difficult to notice, and most gamers are not well-versed enough in programming to detect signs of cheating… and that just scratches the surface of what anti-cheat has to contend with.
Blizzard can’t stop all types of cheats on their own. Many programs don’t interact with the game, and developers don’t have the legal right to inspect every program running on your PC (that would be an invasion of privacy). This is why Player Reports are so critical: in many cases they are the ONLY thing that can stop some cheaters.
And for those non-believers out there who just don’t want to accept that cheating is rampant in gaming, I’ll leave you with this mathematically-correct statistic:
For there to be a 99% chance that a match contains zero cheaters, you would have to believe that only 1 person in every 1095 players cheats.
… and that would be ridiculous. Estimates are that 6 people in every 1000 is a Kleptomaniac. Obviously Kleptomania and cheating are two different problems, but to believe that cheating in video games is 600% RARER than one of the most rare disorders is simply ludicrous. If, for fun, we pretended that 6 people in every 1000 cheated in video games, it would result in 6.4% of all your games containing at least 1 cheater. That’s about 1 in every 16 games.
So the next time you see a Widowmaker with 65% accuracy, or a Hanzo who gets headshots 80% of the time, don’t be afraid to make a quick Report. If you’re wrong, nothing bad will happen to anyone. If you’re right, you’ll help flag a cheater.
The first step in fighting this problem is for people to recognize how big it is.