alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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> 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.
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.