[ohdeargodno]

>There's only a limited amount of IPs available to cheaters, it won't be long before they burn through all of them.

No ? Even if it takes 5 minutes to get noticed (which only happens on the most absolutely blatant cases of cheating), rotating through a few VPNs can easily get you a few thousand different IPs. That's over three consecutive days of cheating. And that's just for a single server. In addition, IP bans means that you potentially nuke hundreds of people: between CGNAT & people playing on shared phone connections, a single IP can be allocated many times.

In addition: this kind of maintenance wears down server owners and admins. Every times, it's more time spent banning someone. Every time, it's players on the server making reports while you're not there, and hoping you have tools that allow you to verify it. Every time, it's players leaving your community, because there's a cheater.

[stoltzmann]

>rotating through a few VPNs can easily get you a few thousand different IPs

It's not uncommon to ban all addresses coming from a datacenter, which will stop the majority of VPNs. That leaves significantly fewer addresses from residential VPNs.

>IP bans means that you potentially nuke hundreds of people: between CGNAT & people playing on shared phone connections, a single IP can be allocated many times

Yep. That's collateral damage. A good server would have an appeals process to handle those cases.

[ohdeargodno]

Absolutely not. All that's going to happen is that someone is going to try to join your server, be banned for no reason, then put it on their shit list.

[Spunkie]

I mean no, good players know how and care to get into populated and well moderated servers and absolutely will find the appeals process and get through it. I speak from experience... I funded, ran, and moderated private/community/dedicated servers across many games.

Alternatively people adding servers to "their shit list" are the exact type of players server admins don't want on their servers anyways. Those morons can go play on the unmodderated corporate servers with all the hackers and leave the rest of us in peace.