[swozey]

I grew up during the Doom 1 era, Quake, CS1.3+, etc and IIRC most if not all had vote kicks before p2p servers and removing server browsers became a thing (I'll probably wind up listing a game that didn't have vote kicking, it's been a long time). I used to admin some game servers. You'd occasionally have vote kick trolls but honestly that caused a lot less drama than keeping a toxic-player/cheater around who would eventually drain the server of players. If the servers ever drained we'd have to throw in bots just so people would even join it again and nobody wants that. We had to do a LOT of IP bans of problem players and occasionally we'd block entire ISPs.

The best thing about these systems was servers would build communities that would self-admin and deal with the drama, for instance Tactical Gamers TF2 servers were my favorite place to play by far.

I don't consider vote kicking to be some fantastic anti-cheat mechanism and the developers still need to provide a lot of support in that area but it definitely helps bridge the gap between reporting cheats and the cheat vectors being closed (if they ever are).

edit: I've only done this on PC games. No idea how well this works in the console community.

[chungus_khan]

The secret there is that vote kicking wasn't the real anti-cheat method, only the delivery. The real anti cheat was the friends we made along the way. Healthy server communities were a treasure back in the day, and functioned as a more compassionate, involved anti-cheat system.

[OGWhales]

Spot on with what I had in mind when making my comment. I suppose this doesn't work nearly as well with matchmaking systems where you don't have a community like you commonly did back in the day