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Comment by klabb3 | Hacker News Reader

Grifters, trolls, asshats always find their way into communities that are centrally moderated. That includes most online games and social media today. This problem isn't solved with anti cheat and government ID checks. In fact this problem was solved years ago, simply by letting each community create their own spaces with their own rules. This means some spaces are private. Others may be semi-open. And some will be fully open, and yes that will always be chaotic.

The only multi-player games I play are with friends or their friends, ie people I already trust. The only social media i use is group chats with friends. Of course, you can have more open and anonymous spaces like we have here on HN, but you need more moderation and the moderators need to feel some sense of pride/ownership to keep on working for free.

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This I agree. Furthermore, you should be able to do such a community by a local network (LAN) instead of using the internet, if you wish. (Free software has this advantage, too; if it does not already do that, you could change it to work.) (Also, some tournaments might be set up in a room in a building; there, they can have dedicated computers.)

Private walled gardens would pretty much kill the competitive scene of most games.

I used to play competitive dota (the original wc3 map) back in the day and the inhouse leagues were a massive pain in the ass. Same with all the various leagues for counter strike (1.6 at the time). UX was terrible, the moderation sucked and you still had to have anti-cheat as people would cheat even in private spaces. Usually the easiest way to get up the ladder was do something dubious and be good friends with the mods so they would rule in your favor.

People use cheats even at LAN events too. So yeah for competitive multiplayer anti-cheat is pretty much required.

At top level I think most scenes are private walled gardens. With possibly some path to raise there outside franchise models.

For average players yes, central developer driven model is much easier and simpler.

Counter-argument is Smash Bros, which is basically only private games and has a competitive scene.

Smash Bros has so bad netcode that serious competitive online play does not really exist. This is why most big fighting game tournaments dropped smash during covid due to being forced to be ran online (and Nintendo is just a real pain to work with). Instead we get some previously "small" game being ran at big tournamets like Skullgirls at EVO because they have rock solid netcode so they can actually be played online at high level.

Also smash is played on consoles that prevent one from installing cheats basically the fact that the whole platform is fully locked down is the anti-cheat. Still controllers are sometimes checked at tournaments for any additions that can run macros (most adapters that allow one to use a different consoles controller can do this)

There was going to be an online Smash tournament using emulation + a mod to improve the netcode but Nintendo shut it down:

https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/19/21578200/super-smash-bros...

And it has barely limped along over the years in comparison to other developer supported FGC games.

This is more of an "exception that proves the rule" since Smash is pretty much the only competitive game with zero centralized support that has broken out of a tiny niche to compete with big names.

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