Comment by thomastjeffery 2 days ago
People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted servers. Right now.
The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping.
Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.
Studios could release the server files when the game is EOL…
My point is that player-moderation scales, while corporate moderation does not. The fact that there are more players on corporate moderated servers only makes this reality more significant.
It's clearly one significant measure. What do you think is going to happen to tournament money if every other tournament has a cheater? How many esports fans want to go play League after watching Faker decimate another team if they have cheaters in their match every other day?
What it tells you most of all is popularity and incentive to cheat. Cast a big enough net and you'll inevitably find cheaters. The bigger the net, the more cheaters you'll collect.
What, 2000 players? 5000?
Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of major titles.
No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports earnings.