Add a Watch Dog like Hypixel.

Watchdog doesn't instantly ban hackers - it gets enough evidence to ban them, then waits a few hours before banning the hacker. They do this to stop players from knowing why they were banned, in order to make it more difficult for clients to evolve to bypass the anticheat.

Brawlbot, meanwhile, will ban the hacker 10 seconds after it collects enough evidence to ban (it waits 10 seconds to give any online staff the opportunity to cancel the autoban and watch the hacker themselves so the mod can ban instead).

Tl;dr: Watchdog is actually really good as far as I can tell: it's hard to test (due to the measures Hypixel has put to stop people from testing their anticheat), but it may be on par with anticheats that large PvP servers have. The only exception is with ghost clients - since Hypixel's staff team aren't very good with detecting ghost clients and they don't do any screensharing, it's rare that someone will get banned for a ghost client.

We're physically unable to have an anticheat that works the same way as Watchdog does.

Watchdog uses deep-learning technology to analyse data sets from both legit players and hackers. It uses this data to determine if a player is hacking or not. As it collects more and more data as time goes by, the anticheat theoretically gets more accurate and efficient at detecting hackers ("theoretically" because it's all based on how well the algorithms are made - deep learning or "machine learning" is quite complicated to do, and certainly above the skillset your average Minecraft developer will have - depends on the experience Cryptkeeper has with machine learning, to be honest),

The reason we're unable to do this is because deep learning requires a very large data set. This is an issue for 2 reasons:

1. We physically do not have enough players or enough hackers to get enough data for a deep learning system to work at all, really. You need a huge dataset to work with for deep learning to be effective enough to be better than Brawlbot. To put it in perspective - Watchdog was active for a few months watching players but not banning; just collecting data. After 40k players on average being watched over the course of a few months, the dataset was still not enough, because the release of Watchdog was a huge mess and there were loads of falsebans.
2. The more data we collect, the more resource-intensive the anticheat will be. We'd need to upgrade our servers to have better specs and/or improve the code to make the servers less laggy, which we don't have the money to do.

Not to mention, experience in deep learning and machine learning technology isn't the kind of thing you can expect the average Minecraft developer to have. We'd likely have to hire a new developer to do this, and that'd be quite a lot more expensive than you'd expect.


Tl;dr: Watchdog isn't bad, they just ban people in a weird way. Also, it uses deep learning/machine learning technology which is very complicated to use and requires a huge data set that we're unable to collect due to our significantly lower playerbase compared to Hypixel.