[claudiawerner]

>Anti-cheating software actually used to be optional. I used to have the option to host or search for servers with anti-cheating disabled. During installation, many games offered me the option to install the anti-cheating module. Battlefield 2 comes to mind.

It was the same with Enemy Territory, you could choose not to enable PunkBuster. It worked quite well, since when PunkBuster stopped providing anti-cheat servers for ET, server admins had to be more proactive with banning - and it worked (and works) pretty well. The issue with games like Overwatch is that you don't host your own server, and you therefore can't choose to ban a certain player if you know they're a cheater.

If Blizzard were to implement host-your-own-server, like older MP games, it would fundamentally change their game dynamic, which is balanced matchmaking with other people in the queue. I'm not a fan of the random matchmaking model (it has destroyed the local community spirit of MP servers), but it does solve some problems - I can now be confident that I'll only be playing with people ranked similarly to me, and it provides a region ranking system where you can gain a higher skill rating and play against more experienced people. In ET, you could join your favourite server and spend a long time getting rolled by a really good player, consistently, and your only recourse would be to abandon that server and find another one, and hope there's not a really good player there either. It's not fun to consistently play against people miles ahead of you.