This wasn't near as much an issue when you had actual servers run by actual people. Too bad the technology to implement a server browser has been lost to time. : ( Perhaps one day we will rediscover it.
I don't get the past tense used here. The creators of the biggest game in the market are using the same model right now, making the sever available for free, with people creating their own server modifications etc. There is a whole culture around it.
He is possibly referring to Minecraft? You can self-host your own server and connect to it via Minecraft, although I am unsure as to whether the server-side component is open-source.
IIRC the server isn't technically open source, but has been heavily reverse-engineered and, for customization purposes at least, might as well be. Most/all of the major extension/plugin frameworks are open source as well.
I don't have the energy right now to have yet another big debate about it, but I've long held that we make our cheating problems in the gaming industry significantly worse and harder to solve by focusing on a very narrow and limited view of competition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28635316
The situation reminds me a lot of piracy. The difference is that it's generally accepted by a large portion of the tech industry that design choices and product offerings can increase piracy, and in contrast there seems to be a lot of denial in the games industry that forcing everything into global ranking systems that teach players to prioritize winning over anything else might exasperate cheating incentives, and make cheating more annoying to normal players, and might make it harder for us to moderate and ban cheaters.
The more subtle point I'm getting at here is not even that global rankings are bad, it's to question: is it good for us to rank people in our games primarily based on whether they win, or does it make more sense to build player-facing mechanics that reward people's ability to create fun matches?
A few other people here commented that the problem with individual servers is that people would get banned for being too good even if they didn't cheat. But why is that a problem? What practically is the difference between getting sniped at spawn by an aimbot and getting sniped by an expert player? Does one feel better than the other? Not really, they both stink for the same reasons. Neither is competitive, neither gives you the opportunity to learn and get better as a player, both feel like you're just getting picked on.
This could be a much, much longer conversation, which I just don't have the time/energy right now to get into in extensive detail, but one very narrow aspect of it is that we optimize for player "legitimacy" when I suspect even many players who love global servers care a lot more about having a competitive game with matches that they win roughly 50% of the time, and with a community that tests their skill and that pushes them to get better at the game.
So why are players cheating just to win random encounters? Well, we optimize for that, we build games that teach players that winning is the primary thing that matters even when there are a lot of other metrics in multiplayer games that are just as valid and just as surfaceable to players. We ignore the fact that our design often creates incentives to cheat. And in contrast, if we stop treating winning as the only primary player motivator, not only can we hopefully reduce a little bit of incentive to cheat, but more importantly we can start to get a lot more direct about combating griefers or players who are spoiling the game in public ways.
I don't expect that literally every game could work this way, but if you can that gives you an advantage while moderating users. If you have an expectation that great players shouldn't be stomping new players just in general, then you don't really need to check if someone is using a cheat to do that, you can monitor for the behavior directly without caring about the method. If you have an expectation that players shouldn't be trolling or griefing each other, you don't need to install a rootkit and check to see if they're using an aimbot to troll, you just ban them for trolling. I would encourage multiplayer developers to think more about optimizing for outcomes rather than methodology.
The issue then was that anyone that was even half decent would get banned off the majority of servers because most admins can't actually distinguish between someone that is cheating and someone that is actually good. I use my Windows computer to play games and I don't really care what level of access Riot needs to provide a good experience. I'd bet the majority of people that play online FPS games don't care either.
The entire point of a ranked matchmaking-based game is to assess your skill, including implementing teamwork with four other players you've never seen before (for solo matchmaking). Server browsers are still a thing if you want to play some rotating game modes in games built for that sort of thing, but way more people want to play ranked CS:GO/FACEIT than CS:GO's custom servers.
Ranked matchmaking is worse at delivering a competitive experience than a community of people who want to have a competitive experience. Don't kid yourself, competitive gaming existed long before ranked matchmaking.
In the days of ‘aim sporadically improved by a slight percentage’ style cheats, I wouldn’t be so sure.
I played on an active Battlefield server with a community constantly ripping itself apart with cheating allegations. This even extended towards well established supporters who donated significant money to the server operation and graphics cards to other players.
Then they’d demand videos and then videos showing mouse movement and pore over them for hours. I know someone who absolutely didn’t cheat (and wasn’t particularly exceptional at playing) but whose movements in game were subject to hours of scrutiny and suspicion.
Yes and also it was the tight nit communities that hung around on the more popular servers that helped monitor and deter cheaters and even have rights to kick users as needed to assist the server operators.
You'd have a few public servers hosted by a group. You'd have a few private servers you could be invited to. Generally, everyone was happier.
And most importantly, once exploit didn't break the entire game, everywhere. Because you could get arbitrarily banned from servers for being an ass.
(And yes, you could hide your IP and redirect. But at some point trolling gets old, and trolls move on)