[whythre]

Back when I played TF2 circa 2010 I helped friends run our own servers and we would just manually ban the cheaters. If they came back me or someone else would ban them again until they got pissy and moved on to greener pastures.

It worked back then, anyway.

[hibikir]

A great technique we used in my servers, it that involves having repeated servers, and a server culture where some trusted players are mods, as otherwise the cheaters vote to ban enough non cheaters to turn the game into a jungle. TF2 itself turned into a cheating horror as Valve servers were added, and the typical player just clicked on quick game, basically destroying the server culture, as you would almost never get new users.

[whythre]

Ah. Now I remember why I stopped playing. Valve funneled everyone away into their own servers and our private server died. After that the play experience, as you say, slowly turned into a horrorshow. Forgot about that bit. Oof.