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> Online multiplayer games must (yes must) take place on servers with human admins.

The sheer scale of this arbitrary requirement is hilarious.

It's not that long ago this was the norm.

Yep, I remember. It was nice to play regularly on a server with names you came to recognise. That will never be the norm again though unfortunately. It still exists in the indie space, however, like for example on VR games such as Pavlov where the playerbase is too small for formal matchmaking.

This was the norm. It just changed in the last few years (say, 10). And it could be the norm again. I still play games with zero cheaters because I return to the same server every night, playing against 63 other players where I usually have seen most of them before. And there is usually an admin there, or someone who can ping one if needed.

I have no idea why this changed in more recent games. While every other online thing moved to have users create content abd self-moderate, games for some reason moved the other direction.

So I just checked the player count of Counter-Strike 2. It's at 936,330 players. At 10 players per match, that's a requirement of 93,633 game moderators...

Trying to also account for total players in every other competitive game seems like an impossible ask.

> It's at 936,330 players. At 10 players per match, that's a requirement of 93,633 game moderators...

I'm not sure why this seems impossible to you? As the number of players increases, one would expect the number of players willing to act as an admin/moderator to increase linearly.

Typically admins are players also - that's why they choose to host a server.

I am still playing Quake Live, and it's all user-run servers. Hacks and cheats can be a problem, but users get banned via their Steam account, and there's a real cost (to buy the game) if you want to come back.

Expecting 10% of the player-base to volunteer as admins instead of (in addition to?) playing the game seems on the high side.

Honestly, this really isn't necessary as long as the game implements votekick/voteban. Kicking alone is usually enough to deal with a problem until an admin is available.

My point was really just that 10% is 10%, regardless of scale.

In CS you can probably get away with fewer and async. But even so, admin powers doesn't weigh anyone down. It's not a chore. You have N admins and then N/10 or so sub-admins who can't ban or unban people but can e.g. silence chat abusers, maybe kick or give a 12h ban etc. It's self moderation and it costs almost nothing.

You probably don’t need that many mods. They can jump around between multiple matches. Looking at one match every ten minutes might yield good enough results. That scales the amount down by 10x, so now you only need 1% of plays volunteering to help their own community.

> I have no idea why this changed in more recent games.

I thought the reasons were basically:

(a) accessibility - running a game server requires some technical knowledge, and if you're doing it from home, possibly changes to your network (and home connections likely won't have as good of routing)

(b) cheat detection - since the server is run by the game developers, it's easier to find misbehaving clients and ban them across all servers.

(c) DRM - it's harder to crack a game that has to sign-in to cloud servers.

I also miss the server browser. That said, there is no world in which it could ever become the norm again. It essentially died in the same wave as personal blogs and other casualties of Web 2.

When you go back this was the norm. You go to irc, search in #5on5: high server on (counter-strike 1.6)

You either have a server and they come to you or you don't and message people. If they/you feel like are hacking go next. There were tons of servers where you had admins all the time.

Human admins still can only see the obvious spin/aimbots.

Companies took this from us as hosting your own servers is rarely an option these days and you rely on the company never shutting them down.

> If they/you feel like are hacking go next.

This here is why I find matchmaking is such a frustrating experience at high ELO compared to the old times. With an IRC scrim you aren't held hostage by blatant cheaters, you just leave - but on matchmaking, you cannot choose to forfeit and have to waste 30 minutes or be penalised.

I only play with a 5 stack so us choosing to leave doesn't ruin anyone's experience. I kept two CS accounts (same rank) purely so that we could skip the cooldown and requeue if the opponent had blatant cheaters/spinbots.

> Online multiplayer games must (yes must) take place on servers with human admins. Admins should be present for a majority of the time any players are playing.

> Ideally with admins the players recognize.

Let's just make each game have a visible referee that is visible to everyone, and then after each infraction, the play can be reviewed under a video assistant. They can even have a group that does nothing but moderates the referees.

Or, we could just have games

Why do you think human admins are the only viable solution? Plenty of games thrive without them—e.g., Apex Legends uses robust reporting and anti-cheat systems, and Rocket League's moderation is largely automated yet effective.

Apex had plenty of cheaters when I played it, if there's a cheater and they're not detecting it there's not much I can do, just 20-30 minutes wasted.

If its a server with admins I can contact them on discord and get them banned pretty quickly. As a system it worked pretty well, had some badmins but there was plenty of servers so could just join another. Though its not really compatible with the matchmaking style games we have today.

I don't think you appreciate:

1. How many active Apex/whatever games there are at any one time 2. How many users will just report anyone they die to as a cheater

That sounds great but there was still cheaters in my games.

Depends on how the game works a suppose. Mostly it depends on whether a cheater would ruin one short game, or many hours of games. I usually find async reporting useless because it already ruined my evening (this is under the assumption I’m playing a server and have no interest playing anywhere else, but a single cheater can ruin the game for everyone for a whole day). Whether that cheater gets disciplined later doesn’t help anyone in that scenario unless they were kicked from the game right away.

I agree for the most part, there are other ways, like a phone number, manual verification with a photo, require players to play 10hr before they can play competitive, have a recommendation from other players, etc, or even a pay-once 5 dollars game pass on top of all those things.

Although I recommend you to watch the valve presentation of AI anti cheat if you did not already. Their work is quite interesting, and they claim they catch 99% of cheaters.

Although obviously there are also very subtle ways to cheat, too.

> they claim they catch 99% of cheaters

But that's easy. The tricky part is catching the cheaters _without_ also catching non-cheaters.

I ban 100% of players. no cheaters! 0%!