Let players run their own servers and host their own playgroups as they did before game servers were monetized.
Then when someone cheats you ban them until they apologize in person and sing the Very Sorry Song.
This has been proven to work time and again. The only reason it is not the default is that some value extractor just has to feed their kids.
At any time of day or night, I can just sign in and immediately find a match. In addition, it can match me against players that are close to my skill level so the games I play are fair and challenging. I can keep my statistics to see how I do over time in those fair and challenging games.
This is a very valuable service.
I have played on plenty of community hosted servers, and the experience is hit or miss. Sometimes, you will get power hungry mods who ban anyone who is better than them, or won’t ban the cheaters because they are friends. Without the anti cheat tools, it is often very hard to distinguish people who are really good and people who are cheating, so you leave it up to the whims of the moderators.
Yes, you could tell me to just go and find a different server, but I don’t want to spend my time trying to find a good server I just want to play… and who knows if the good server I find will still be around the next time I play.
I have thousands of hours on both types of games, and for any sort of competing games (whether FPS, RTS, or sports), I get a lot more enjoyment out of centralized matchmaking with anticheat.
I even remember ICCUP for Starcraft 1 had 'anti-hack'.
Being able to host your own playgroups is generally possible in modern games still. Private lobbies on their public servers exist, but that's still more effort than people are willing to do versus hitting the 'play game' button. We used to call those PUGs.
If I had the option of Quake 3 Arena-style "matchmaking" and no cheats, or 2024 matchmaking and cheats I'd choose option 2 every time.
Also the f2p model isn't doing us any favors by making new accounts cost zero, though iirc cheats can cost like $100/mo so I assume dedicated cheaters would still cheat if games all cost money.
I think parent's point is that you don't need skill-based matchmaking and ranking systems if you give players the ability to self-organize.
You don't need this stuff, of course, but people (who don't play games) love to dismiss these things as if they don't matter.
I mean, I know the answer, it's because doing both would be significantly more work for unproven returns, but still, a guy can dream.
The rise of those things you describe matched the decline of my interest in any form of online multiplayer.
The problems start when everyone cares about their damn ranking. And yes, even casuals care about that crap. Everybody follows the same strategies, everyone is whiny and annoying because losing means your ranking is damaged.
Back in the day nobody cared. A match went awry because someone did a completely retarded build on their toon, or didn't know how to play with the class they picked? Oh well, game is over, you find a new one.
The ranking itself is meaningless, the only thing important is that it accurately represents my skill so that it can be used to find a match.
It sounds like I might play different kinds of online games than you… I mostly play sports games, which don’t have the issues you describe.
So many quality of life standards have been sacrificed just to let jackasses feel superior to others in what is supposed to be a fun game.
Mostly because ranked games were full of tryhards that raged constantly and in general didn't actually treat the game like a game.
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In fact now that I think about it... some of my funnest LoL games back in the day was when I got paired with someone way out of my league in unranked and they would spend a lot of the game mentoring teammates.
And when the opposite happened, we would get stomped quickly and would be able to into a new match quickly. No one felt the need to drag out a unfun/mismatched game because their ranking would get hurt. Wasn't really an issue.
By far, the best time I had in online multiplayer was playing Dota (the WC3 map, not the standalone atrocity that exists nowadays).
No ranked whatever. Every game was a blank slate. Nobody really cared, everyone was having fun. People tried weird builds, odd team composition, etc. You sometimes played with nice people and added them to friends.
With ranked matchmaking everybody is pissy if you are not playing optimally, everyone moans and hisses when they lose, etc.
A lot of the time in the game was spent scrimming on private servers against other teams. Public games were played on the team’s public server, where people of all skill levels would meet. The highest skilled players would always look to be challenged and would switch to the weaker team all the time. Of course on the scoreboard you’d have people who had a K/D of 40/2 and people who were 1/12.
People who weren’t looking to improve and got stomped would of course leave.
After a while of playing on a server you’d know the good players and they’d also self select to form teams with each other and move to private servers.