@nprofile1q... It's worse because it's not a linear game like chess. You aren't competing move-wise, you are going down your own path where there is no interaction between teams. There's no way to detect that in online competition, even heuristically. There's no realtime monitoring. There isn't any condensed format that describes "what you did". At most you could stream yourself to some kind of video escrow system, but then who is going to watch those? And if you make them public after the competition, you are giving away your tools to everyone. And you could still have an LLM on the side on another machine and parallel construct the whole thing plausibly.

Sure you could do in-person only, but that would only work for the top tiers and who is going to want to learn and grow online when a huge number of people are going to be cheating online?

It's the same with any kind of game. Sure cheating is barely a concern in-person, but people hate cheaters online, and companies still try hard to detect cheaters. And detecting cheaters for a CTF is nigh impossible.