alt Hacker News> GameDevs don't actually like paying a shit load of money for anti-cheat (that also breaks their debugging systems and causes bugs: a wonderful combination)... so if you've got a better way: join the industry and fix it. You'll be a moderately wealthy person.
I got a better way... just look at the past. Back in ye goode olde UT2004 times, there was no random matchmaking / ranking bullshit that removed the social element, game licenses cost money, people ran their own servers, and if you pissed off server mods enough, no matter if you were a cheater, a suspected cheater, or just an asshole, your serial got banned - sometimes, across a fleet of servers that shared ban lists. Cheating had costs associated.
But of course, that means you can't lure in whales with free to play games and loot them via microtransactions any more...
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I played Warcraft 3 competitively in the "goode olde" times. Ladder was full to bursting with maphackers. It was still the way most people played, even though it also fully supported custom lobbies/rooms, which were used plenty for DotA, but almost never for random 1v1 matches. It sucked.
You don't have a better way. You have a nostalgic memory of how games should be played which doesn't match what people in a modern audience expect. It's like saying the solution to cell phones tracking you is to use a landline, because that's how we used to do things.
Thats a cynical take.
The truth is that UT2004 sold 234,451 units over its life according to Wikipedia.
The Division sold over 10,000,000 copies in the first weekend.
The requirements change drastically when you have a larger audience.
This ignores that community servers basically invented client anticheats. Almost all the current 3rd party anticheats started for community servers. Even Quake 3 Arena was updated with Punkbuster at some point.
You still see this with modern day servers. Modded GTA V, FiveM, had additional anticheat even before the unmodded game added anticheat. Part of the appeal of CS2 servers, Face-IT and ESEA, is the additional anticheats.