"I haven't played world of tanks and wouldn't know how it works but it does sound interesting to prevent a client from knowing where a player is, however doesn't that only limit the cheaters to see in their field of view or render range?"
World of tanks does visibility checks between the tank "eye" and 7 points on enemy tanks, to determine if a tank is visible or occluded by world geometry. Meaning, if you are completely occluded by obstacles, then enemy client's would not even be told about your world position by the server. There is also "minimum distance" where clients are always told about enemy tanks, even if they are occluded.
In APEX, because of the speed at which players move relative to each other, this minimum "full information" distance would probably need to be somewhere around 100m, because you wouldn't want to quickly run into a building, see nobody there, and then have a person "pop in" when the server-round-trip latency finally told you he was there. Which means it would prevent xray cheats from working across the map, but it wouldn't stop them from working in close-quarters combat situations.
There would be some additional server workload, but it seems tractable...
World of Tanks has 15v15 battles, which means it's potentially checking 7 points per tank against 15 enemy tanks, so worst case it's doing (7 * 15 * 2) = 210 ray intersection tests per frame. However, in the common case it can skip most of the checks, because as soon as a tank is visible to any member of the enemy team, it's visible to all of them. Which means in practice it probably does closer to (1.5 * 30) = 45 ray intersection checks.
In APEX, there are 60 independent players, and there is no "team vision". If the number of points checked was reduced to 4 (head, shoulder, shoulder, feet), this would be worst-case (4 * 57) = 228 checks per frame. This could optimized by omitting checks for players too close or too far from each other, and would benefit from the natural benefit of players dying throughout the match.. however, it would be increased server computational load relative to today's design. I tend to think this math work is cheaper than actually sending out the data to every client, but I have not tested anything like this.
"Lastly I think one of the core parts of this game is actually aiming and the ability to track an enemy, granting aimbot to players by default would change the meta to who can loot the best ranged weapon or who has high ground."
We *already* have combat between players of even aiming skill, and the meta is not be that simplistic. It is a strategic tactical combat game.
When aiming skill is near equal, combat between players is about strategic decisions to use cover, teammates, heals, relative weapon strengths, legend abilities, and positional strategy to try to make sure that you're efficiently applying more damage than you're receiving...This includes shooting at people who are not shooting at you, rotating damage between teammates, using third party attacks, shoot-and-run, engaging at a range efficient for your weapon but not your enemies'.
In fact, this is ALREADY the game today between players of equal aim skill. (and consider that console already has aim-assist in APEX, Fortnite, and other games). Strategic tactical gameplay is also what you will see in skill-based-matchmaking queues if they are ever available, because players will have more similar aiming capabilites.
Personally, I'd rather play a game where everyone has access to strategic tactical gameplay, rather than most of the player base insta-losing to people with better aim.
That said, in a game where everyone has auto-aim, it's a problem to have weapons tuned like like the wingman, which basically win at all engagement ranges if aimed correctly. This is one of the reasons players consider the wingmanso OP, because anyone who can aim (either cheat aimbot or human aimbot) can insta-win 1v1s with it.
Weapons have to have more of a rock-paper-scissors balance, where sniper guns have an advantage at longer ranges, pistols and shotguns have an advantage in short-range high mobility situations, and automatic weapons are mid range weapons which "lose" straight up at long range vs snipers or short range vs shotguns and pistols, but are the most flexible and can deal great damage if you can shoot while not being shot at.
