It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the problem.
The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.
And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.
It doesn't matter how good the game developers are, someone out there is could make a better map.
The studios took control of everything, and their answer is to rootkit our computers, and to buy more DLC if we want another map.
Personally, I don't accept the premise that such studio control is necessary for me to have fun playing a game.
I especially miss custom maps.
Rust remains maybe the last true community game that's just solid all the way through where the studio is good to its players and doesn't patronize and betray them. I can have the sort of fun I would have had 20 years ago in Rust, and everything else feels like monocultural slop by comparison.
I wish more of my friends wanted to play it, and wish I had more time for it.
Anti-cheat is about protecting DLC profits as much as it is anything else.
It's a shame too because we got so much good content from random people who just loved the games and wanted to create neat things for them. It was one way that some people started their careers in the video game industry and it spawned a lot of other websites and communities around sharing, reviewing, and creating all that free content.
If anything, we are in a golden age of mods!
There was a time when the concept of "banned mods" only ever applied to a specific server out of countless other servers and locally you could do anything you wanted, even run your own server.
You reject the premise that such control is necessary for your idea of fun.
But millions of players enjoy ranked matchmaking enough that without aggressive anti cheat you will wind up with cheaters.
I hate the root kits as well, but if you spend any time playing Valorant vs CS, you will see the difference. If I play CS consistently I'll get cheaters once or twice a week. In Valorant it's almost unheard of by comparison. It sucks, but that's just what's happening.
Do I wish I at least had the option in Valorant or whatever to host a server? Absolutely. Do I think they use the rootkits maliciously? No, generally not. Do I think studios are disincentivized to provide server hosting due to DLC or microtransactions? Definitely. But I also think there's often also a game integrity component. All of these things can be true simultaneously.
Case in point, Counter Strike is a rare example of a popular game which supports both the "modern" matchmaking paradigm and the classic community server paradigm... and for better or worse the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking.
The server browser is buried under a couple layers of obtuse menus (and, at present, is completely broken on my SteamOS machine) while matchmaking is obvious and straightforward. You cannot come to any reasonable conclusions about player preference given the way the UI drives players towards matchmaking and away from servers. If they were presented on equal footing you might have a point.
Consider also TF2. It launched as a server-based game, and in the years after matchmaking was added Valve went through many UX iterations designed to drive traffic to it before it was more popular.
The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping.
Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.
Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of major titles.
No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports earnings.
Pulling out a few games with less than 5000 players globally isn't remotely comparable to having hundreds of thousands of players daily.
It's amplified even more for games that have a global ranking system and a professional competitive scene.
What it tells you most of all is popularity and incentive to cheat. Cast a big enough net and you'll inevitably find cheaters. The bigger the net, the more cheaters you'll collect.
I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with.
I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least.
That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.
However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly guarantees that most of the people they play against will never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever experience toxicity in online competitive games.
Server browser games solve this because players end up with "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and over time build communities who do the same. This was taken away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking because of it.
But this is in no way required, and merely a result of gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put people in games with players that they have not previously reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time, but since these players are in the fat normal distribution, their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly low.
Larger games have the luxury of being able to place players into teams consisting entirely of other players of similar skill levels, against teams of similar composition. The results of those games are a better reflection of those players' skill.
PP wasn't talking about ranking stability. PP was talking about the "Why should I give a shit about the leaderboard when ten million people play the game, and I'm someone with life obligations that aren't 'playing this game, exclusively', so I'm always in the middle of a sea of strangers because I can never git particularly gud?".
You might argue that the solution to that is to have separate rankings for folks in your friends' (or whatever) list, and I agree... but I'd get the same thing as filtered-to-friends-only leaderboards with leaderboards that are restricted to the population of players on the private servers on which I play. Plus, private servers give you the option to benefit from active admins who ban cheaters and other shitheels forever. [0]
[0] Or encourage them to cheat and be godawful, if that's the sort of server that they want to run. All-cheats-all-the-time and/or vent-your-spleen-24/7 servers are fun, too... just so long as folks are informed of what they're getting into by joining.
There are even ranked, private competitive leagues like TF2Center
If they would just let the cheaters win their way up the ranks, they could have their own little cheater lobbies and we wouldn’t have to deal with them.
Games are a social thing we do to have fun, there’s no obligation to spend your limited social free time hanging out with annoying people.
When people play in these “competitive” matchmaking queues, it is more like a pickup game. If somebody shows up to a pickup baseball game with a corked bat, they are just kind of a loser and it isn’t a big deal, right? There’s no actual reward for hitting “platinum rank” or whatever in most games, other than skins or something. Nothing real is on the line.
IMO: we really should just have let these people cheat their way out of the normal matchmaking population. Smurfing is a much bigger problem. I don’t actually care if the guy dominating the match with some 60:0 kill-death-ratio is cheating or a semi-pro beating up on casuals, haha.
It's the same phenomenon you see in many sectors.
Access is democratized and the friction/barrier to play is dramatically lowered/free, and the localization is diluted or non existent and just a monoculture.
Does it though? Unless winning has real-world rewards, does it really matter that much if you are playing against someone who is cheating, if with cheating, they are evenly matched against you? Assuming the matchmaking works well, people who cheat would end up getting matched with either other people who cheat, or people who are good enough to compete against cheaters.
A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.
Most competitive games these days are free to play. A cheater gets banned, makes a new account, and gets placed on the competitive ladder level of a new player, and stomps their way up the ladder against unskilled players until they get banned, and repeat.
For players that cheat less egregiously and don't get banned, it's still obvious many times when someone has no skill but is using cheating as some form of assistance. It's not fun to play against a player who has a similar K/D ratio as you because they suck at aiming but can see through walls, or because they can instantly headshot people but have bad positional awareness or understanding of other game objectives like capture points etc.
It's like telling a high level chess player that playing against a child with poor chess knowledge but they're allowed to just ignore checks and flick your pieces off the board is similar to playing against an equally skilled non-cheating player just because they're capable of beating you only 50% of the time. A victory doesn't feel earned, a loss doesn't feel like an actionable learning experience.
The ranking system needs to be a better determinate of skill, especially early in a new accounts life, so that they can stop harming normal players games. This might mean changes to the rules of a game to allow this to be done better. The match-maker should take this into account, so that if a player does go up against a player that was far from the skill level that they end up at, it should protect that account from being placed with new players for a time so that they can forget about it.
For the example you choose for Chess, you might force players to do Chess Puzzles before they can queue for their first match. A normal player would then never see any cheaters.
And the very best cheaters are still good at the games they cheat in, they just want to use cheats to be even better. One famous example in a game I play is Riolu in Trackmania. He was probably one of the top 10 players in the world. But he wanted to be #1. When he was accused of cheating it took a mountain of evidence for anyone to believe the accusations because he could set a world record live in-person. He just used cheats to be able to do it with fewer attempts.
I'll note here that the work that Nadeo has done on the matchmaking aspect is in line with what I'm thinking and should be expanded throughout the online gaming space. A division 10 COTD player will never see a cheater. If cheaters do show up, as they commonly do in Weekly Shorts leaderboards, the community ignores it. Their region leaderboards do a much better job than typical games of bringing the community together and they promote continuity. When top players smurf COTD on a new name, the community sniffs it out within the hour. TM doesn't need anti-cheat.
- If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned.
- If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate something that was obvious cheating.
- Cheaters could just change server often.
It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy to switch servers.
Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies, which do exactly what you want, and there is a reason why only a minority of players uses it.
Yes, sometimes you run into power-tripping moderators. That comes with the territory of having moderators. But the upsides, of being embedded in a usefully-sized community, and having nearly constant human moderation, not to mention the whole "stop killing games" of it all, far outweigh the need to shop around a bit for a good server.
I think the ideal middle ground is something like Squad's server system: The developers offer a contract to server owners, establishing basic standards that must be met to be a recommended server. Rules forbidding the crazy bigotry that milsims tend to attract, minimum server specs to ensure smooth gameplay, an effective appeals process. If a server meets those requirements, and signs the agreement to keep meeting those standards, they get put on a "recommended" server list (which 90%+ of the playerbase exclusively use). Other servers go on the "custom" server list, which can be modded, or spun up for certain events, or whatever.
That's the kind of things that were common too, maybe you forgot about it.
My negative experiences with community servers represent a pretty short list. Sometimes servers die, but games die sometimes, too. That's obviously only an issue with persistent-state games, like Minecraft, but it's unfortunate when it happens. Can't say it was so frequent that it impacted my enjoyment of any games as a whole.
Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server browser.
Edit to add: I'm not disputing that kernel-level anticheat is bad; I agree that it is. I don't think it helps to try and hearken back to a golden age of PC gaming that didn't really exist. Maybe it was easier for server admins to manage because player populations were smaller back then, but that's about all that would have made things "better."
Believe it or not us old folks who played during this time had ways to address these issues.
was my favorite in the Quake3A mod I played.
Back then, the most common option taken was leaving the server to find another one.
Not everyone is interested in a "fair and balanced competitive match" where you're guaranteed to win no more and no less than 50% of the time. I actually find that intolerably boring.
Lots of the mosts played competitive games have that, or third party websites/discords that have links to custom lobbies.
I have to conclude you're unfamiliar with what multiplayer gaming was like when servers were the norm.
Did you even played a single game competitively ? The fact you keep pushing for server browser tell me that no, you need communities on something else. You likely forgot the hassle that server browser were, and forgot that lots of games didn't had a server browser.
LFG communities were important and excluding this shows you were only playing casually, forgot all the problems servers browser had.
Do you even remember, that you could get malware by joining servers in a server list ?!?
99% of people who played CS1.x/tf/Q3A/bf1942/cod/etc booted up the game, found a server in the browser with low ping to play on, and if they liked it they favorited it. They came back the next day, and the next, and started to recognized other players. That is the server browser experience.
If you were in the tiny minority of players trying to be "competitive" back then, you're right I don't know what it looked like for you. Sounds like it sucked, honestly, and maybe competitive matchmaking solved some of those problems, but in the bargain we lost a lot of what made those games fun for "casuals" as you smugly call us.
Your favorite server was not always online
Some people were too good on the server you like and it wasn't fun.
Countless other problems, and you needed to sink in a lot of time to get the few quality time you wrote about.
Sounds like you've got a skill issue. That doesn't match my experience, like, at all.
But a really, really easy shortcut was to find servers that indicated that they were furry-friendly. This all but guaranteed that
1) The folks on there would be fairly even-keeled and reasonable, and folks who weren't would be rapidly banned forever.
2) The folks on there would generally be good at the game. [0]
3) If you're lucky -and the game is one that permits custom "sprays" (as HL1 and Source engine did)- you might get to see some high-quality-but-thumbnail-sized furry porn.
[0] Seriously, at least back when both server browsers and user-hosted game servers were commonplace, I found a 1:1 correlation between "Are they a furry?" and "Are they particularly good at the game?". It was wild.
Playing against overwhelming odds has its own kind of charm. I once spend days just sabotaging the top players on some gun game servers, only wining myself once or twice. Games against friends with various fun handicaps and flat out abuse of any knowledge you could gain from playing against the same people repeatedly - what good is a hidding spot when everyone knows you will be there 50% of the time.
"Fair and balanced" games against completely random people are just missing something for me.
Of course, classic competitive institutions had problems as well (“he’s very competitive” is not necessarily a nice description of a person!), but they seemed more enjoyable that this matchmaking stuff.
Yes, there were poorly moderated servers, but you could simply leave and try a different community until you found one that clicked for you. When you require equal moderation everywhere, you throw the baby out with the bath water.
Punkbuster for Team Fortress. BattleEye for Battlefield. EasyAntiCheat started for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War ICCUP's anti-hack client. You can see this in modern community servers too. Face-IT and ESEA for CS2 have more anti-cheat, not less. FiveM, which modded GTA V for community servers, never worked for Linux even before they added anti-cheat to the full game, because they had their own anti-cheat, adhesive.
Admins for modern game servers are not going to be interested in turning off their anti-cheat. That just gives them more unpaid work for little gain.
I ran servers for a lot of games. It was often difficult to ban people from playing. First off, someone with ban permissions would have to actually be online at the time. So often nothing would happen at all, you'd just have to leave and find a different server. Second, one could get banned, often just change their IP or use a different CD key or whatever other identifier the game used, and hop back on with a new identity.
Meanwhile discoverability of similarly skilled matches were a challenge, along with actually playing with a group of friends against new people. Its not some perfect panacea, there are a lot of things people disliked about picking private servers to play on.
We also had skill-separated servers. Casual ones had votebans for teams and players that were too organized/skilled/abusive, with case by case mod approval. Anarchy servers had nearly zero rules and were absolutely cutthroat and toxic but fair, you always knew what you were signing up for. They even had mods temporarily banning players for whining.
Cheaters never lasted long in our servers, including returning ones. Running a dedicated server takes some dedication. Know the game and people you're doing this for.
When you have accurate matchmaking, you will be playing against other players of a similar skill level. If you we're playing in single-player mode, it wouldn't bother you that some of the players were better than others.
Whether the person you're playing against is as good as you because they have aim assist, while you have a 17g mouse and twitch reflexes shouldn't matter. You're both playing at equivalent skill levels.
The only reason it matters to anyone is that they want their skills to be recognized as better than someone else's. Take down the leaderboards, and bring back the fun.
I say, let the people cheat.
No, it is not fun to play against smurf accounts using hacks. They aren't doing it for the leaderboards, they actively downrank themselves to play against worse players!
And no, it's not fun to play against cheaters who are so bad at situational awareness their rank is still low, but who instantly headshot you in any tense 1v1 and ruin your experience.
And no, I actually do care that people are cheating in multiplayer games because it's not fair. Since when do we reward immoral fuckwits who can't or won't get better at the game?
Why don't we just start letting basketball players kick each other and baseball players tar their hands while we're at it. Who cares if the sanctity of the sport or competition is ruined - we're a community of apathetic hacks.
You can't have accurate matchmaking and allow cheating. People cheat for a variety of reasons, at lot of cheaters are just online bullies that enjoy tormenting other players. In a low ELO lobbies, you would have cheaters that have top tier aim activated only if they lose too much, making the experience very inconsistent.
Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server handle peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest cheating software. It's an interesting technical challenge, but not a fun game. As soon as a non cheating player is in view of a cheating player, the non cheating player dies. That doesn't make for a fun game mechanic.
Fun fact, this does exist. There used to be old CS:GO servers that were explicitly hack v hack, would make it abundantly clear to any new visitors that stumbled upon the servers that you would NOT have any fun without a "client", and it was a bunch of people out-config'ing each other. It was actually kinda cool for those people, it would NEVER be fun for anyone else.
In general, really.
It's fun when I get something down (and fully use a starter kit, if a server has it) and have neighbors to dick around with, or there's not enough traffic to actually enjoy landmarks and underground, or occasionally when I meet someone that's down to team up or just talk on mic while pacing around one of our bases. But when that doesn't happen, I'm just not having fun haha
I am also a WJ watcher.
The problem is that it doesn't matter how good you are. You will not beat a computer. Ever. Playing against someone who is using a computer is just completely meaningless. Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.
...and, even worse, if they ever got to the very top of the ladder and started only playing against other cheaters, then they'd actually weaken their cheats so that they could drop down in ranking to play against (and stomp) non-cheaters again, and/or find creative ways to make new accounts.
Cheaters ruin games. The fact that the GP is so deluded as to claim that "The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards." suggests that they've never actually played a competitive matchmade game on a computer before.
Honest players never really complained, so I guess it worked for them.
If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat. If the cheat lets you be better than the best human players, the best human player will end up just playing cheaters.
It's almost kind of worse than this. If you are in higher skill levels, you end up getting matched with cheaters who lack the same fundamental understanding of the game that you do and make up for it with raw mechanical skill conferred by cheats.
So you get players who don't understand things like positioning, target priority, or team composition, which makes them un-fun to play with, while the aimbots and wallhacks make them un-fun to play against.
And as a skilled player, you are much better equipped to identify genuine cheaters in your games. Whereas in low skill levels cheaters may appear almost indistinguishable from players with real talent so long as they aren't flat out ragehacking with the aimbot or autotrigger.
First, cheating is absolutely still an issue in Rust. Sure, server admins can kick them out... once they have been discovered, verified by an admin, and kicked. The damage is usually done by then, and that is the best case scenario... often, the admins aren't available at that moment, because they are normal people who are not online all the time.
Plus, this means you have to search and find a good server to play on. That isn't always easy, and limits your ability to find a good game.
Second, lots of games I love to play don't make sense in the 'server hosted by a community member' model.
I love playing sports games... Madden, FIFA (now called FC), NBA2k, etc. The best way to play those games is often 1on1 against someone who is close to your skill level. It isn't fun to play against people way worse or way better than you.
The only way to do this in a way that lets me get a good game whenever I want to play is to have some sort of matchmaking system, that keeps track of how good i am and finds players who are about the same skill level. There is no way this would work on user hosted servers, and even if it did, why would a user hosted server be better at solving this problem than a company hosted one? You need a TON of players to be able to do good skill based matchmaking 24 hours a day.
I have been playing multiplayer online games for over 30 years. I started playing when I had to call my friend on the phone, tell him to tell his family not to answer the next call because it was my modem calling, and then hope to god my sister didn't pick up the phone during our game and break the connection. We had to develop a code to signal if I was actually trying to call him to talk about an issue; if I called and hung up immediately it meant I was voice calling and the next call he should answer with the phone.
I have played every iteration of multiplayer gaming. I played Warcraft II when you had to pay $20 to subscribe to Kali to use their virtual IPX service. I played local Counterstrike games at the college dorms on the local network (which was not even a switched network!) I run Minecraft servers for my kids on my local network. I have written multiplayer games for both peer-to-peer and server based multiplayer.
No, you can't recreate the modern convenience and pleasure of company provided matchmaking by going back to community hosted servers.
Make the anti-cheat follow one of the key tenets of cybersecurity: never trust user input.
Should work reasonably well for first-person shooters.
You're ranked based on the game's inner metrics, calculated on the server, rather than player-visible ones:
- time from observation to target contact with crosshairs (inc. standard deviation, standard error)
- % of time successfully striking specific hit boxes
and so on (depending on the game).
These rankings don't affect your public rankings but do affect who you're match-made with, or games that don't have private server options. Eventually you'll only be match-made with other cheaters, or players so good they give cheaters a genuine run for their money.
For games that do have private server options it could be configurable to:
- flag the player to admins as 'suspicious' for investigation
- Start ignoring hits that would've otherwise been successful for statistical outlier behaviours (where the statistical analysis indicates a significant disparity between observed and known-human-like reaction times and behaviours).
Even if cheats were used on the server, their
Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.
We had this, it worked, for years. I'm baffled by all the posters saying it won't, because it did.
Standalone servers you need to run separately and care for are much more rare.
Let's put it differently: What % of people among those who program are interested in maintaining open source software?
A very low %, and yet it's a thriving ecosystem.
To bring it back to gaming: How many people who game are interested in modding, or creating models/maps/etc? Again, a very low %, and yet...
As another example: how about hosting a website?
Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further.
IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.
The entire narrative of "cheating" is a giant misdirect. People don't actually care about cheating, they care about fun. If a player is making the game less fun, it does not matter how.
The real problem is that ~10 years ago major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting. This means that the responsibility of moderation is now in their hands. The only way this problem can ever be resolved is by giving the authority to moderate servers back to players. Until then, the responsibility to moderate will be unmet, no matter how fascist and authoritarian game studios become. Fascism cannot guarantee fun!
How are game studios "fascist"?
By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone.
It's kind of like thinking you can forgo anti-bot measures because your website's users can just report the bots: by the time it's your users' problem, you've ruined the experience for everyone except the bots.
You didn't answer the GP's question. You talked about what you wanted.
The answer to their question is: the majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online have decided that they want anticheat, and disagree with you.
The majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online didn't get consulted, the developers put anti-cheat in after the audience was already entrenched. The players didn't "decide" anything, Riot games decided it in like 2020 and the players have middling to negative feelings about it. You weren't talking about Riot Games? Well you said "majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online" and that's Riot Games, so yes you were.
Citation needed. Strong assertions like "you're just wrong" are automatically false if evidence isn't provided. Where's your evidence for this?
> The majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online didn't get consulted, the developers put anti-cheat in after the audience was already entrenched.
Completely irrelevant to anything we're talking about here. Although I'm not surprised, given that it's coming from someone with other utterly insane statements like "I would not be shocked if simple vote-kick outperforms every anti-cheat on the market." that suggest that you've never played competitive matchmade games or interacted with trolls on the internet, or completely failed to respond to hombre_fatal's question (whether due to bad faith or lack of reading comprehension is unclear) and just made some unrelated snide statement.
In games like Warcraft 3 and Halo 2, the automated ranked matchmaking was well-regarded and a huge departure from waiting for a lobby to fill only for the admin to kick you because his friend wants to join or because you're playing the Age of Empires civ that he wants to play.
Auto randomization also baked in solutions to questions like how to stop people from farming rank.
The difference is there is usually an existing level of trust between people playing on a private server. Usually your group would know ahead of time if someone is going to potentially be a problem.
Furthermore, even with public dedicated servers, there's a psychological aspect to it - it's no longer just a random matchmaking server; you're almost walking into someone's house. Many people feel a lot more pressure not to misbehave
Then there's the fact that you don't have to wait many days for your cheating report to hopefully be acted on. Our game got interrupted? Well, that sucks, but we can just ban that guy and go again and we likely won't have to worry that our very next game will also contain a cheater
Finally: these defences always have an implicit assumption with it: that the horribly pervasive anti-cheats actually... you know, work. They do, to a rather limited extent, but cheaters are still rampant, so what's the point?
The question is what to do about the rest of the time for everyone else. Shopping around private servers and dealing with individual server admin quirks is a regression from matchmaking UX that Starcraft had in the late 90s or that Halo 2 had in the early 2000s.
If you wanna matchmake, great, go ahead.
If you want to run a private server, you can do that too.
Does it mean a better experience though? This isn't like, a theoretical GP is talking about. We don't have to imagine if
> That's how bad cheating is.
Seems like the answer is no?