[WhiteDawn]

Counterstrike through the ages used to be a paid product. After a ban your whole account was locked down, so in a practical sense it used to always have a 20-50 “escrow” fee to join the pool of legitimate players. Even today the cs:go “prime” status does a similar thing.

It doesn’t seem to affect the number of cheaters in any way, if anything it leads to incentives of account stealing and underground exchanges of steam acc/keys.

Personally I feel the cheating issue is more of a side effect of games moving away from dedicated servers with communities and towards global matchmaking. There used to be well run servers that would quickly kick-ban cheating players and have a social construct that incentivizes playing nice to keep access to the good servers.

Not that practical today with all the battle royals and as with any “government” there is abuse and corruption, it wasn’t perfect but I do miss the days of servers that always had a admin online to shutdown cheaters and rules around minimum pings and bare-minimum sportsmanship in the voice chat.

[ThatPlayer]

I think the community servers solution wouldn't have scaled up to current markets. Back in the day with smaller userbases you'd have less casual players, more people who would be interested in administrating a server and willing to work for free. Now that gaming is mainstream and everyone does it, not everyone cares as much as people used to back then.

Counter-Strike itself still has community servers as an option. And given the choice between those servers and regular matchmaking, most players prefer the latter. This map hasn't updated in 4 years, but I doubt that has changed: https://teamwork.tf/worldmap/csgo/live

[Xeoncross]

Setting a $500 entry fee would quickly shrink the global pool to about the size of a dedicated server. Not that local server wouldn't still be an option as well if someone (or a group) wanted to run it.

For people that just walk into the game though, I wouldn't mind paying to instantly have a well-curated global community without having to vet each server trying to find the good ones. Again though, for kids with more time I think there is room for both.