[danShumway]

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.

[TulliusCicero]

Nah, even without global rankings or whatever you’d have tons of people wanting to cheat just so they can win encounters.

[danShumway]

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.