This was the norm. It just changed in the last few years (say, 10). And it could be the norm again. I still play games with zero cheaters because I return to the same server every night, playing against 63 other players where I usually have seen most of them before. And there is usually an admin there, or someone who can ping one if needed.

I have no idea why this changed in more recent games. While every other online thing moved to have users create content abd self-moderate, games for some reason moved the other direction.

So I just checked the player count of Counter-Strike 2. It's at 936,330 players. At 10 players per match, that's a requirement of 93,633 game moderators...

Trying to also account for total players in every other competitive game seems like an impossible ask.

> It's at 936,330 players. At 10 players per match, that's a requirement of 93,633 game moderators...

I'm not sure why this seems impossible to you? As the number of players increases, one would expect the number of players willing to act as an admin/moderator to increase linearly.

Typically admins are players also - that's why they choose to host a server.

I am still playing Quake Live, and it's all user-run servers. Hacks and cheats can be a problem, but users get banned via their Steam account, and there's a real cost (to buy the game) if you want to come back.

In CS you can probably get away with fewer and async. But even so, admin powers doesn't weigh anyone down. It's not a chore. You have N admins and then N/10 or so sub-admins who can't ban or unban people but can e.g. silence chat abusers, maybe kick or give a 12h ban etc. It's self moderation and it costs almost nothing.

Expecting 10% of the player-base to volunteer as admins instead of (in addition to?) playing the game seems on the high side.

Honestly, this really isn't necessary as long as the game implements votekick/voteban. Kicking alone is usually enough to deal with a problem until an admin is available.

My point was really just that 10% is 10%, regardless of scale.

You probably don’t need that many mods. They can jump around between multiple matches. Looking at one match every ten minutes might yield good enough results. That scales the amount down by 10x, so now you only need 1% of plays volunteering to help their own community.

> I have no idea why this changed in more recent games.

I thought the reasons were basically:

(a) accessibility - running a game server requires some technical knowledge, and if you're doing it from home, possibly changes to your network (and home connections likely won't have as good of routing)

(b) cheat detection - since the server is run by the game developers, it's easier to find misbehaving clients and ban them across all servers.

(c) DRM - it's harder to crack a game that has to sign-in to cloud servers.

I also miss the server browser. That said, there is no world in which it could ever become the norm again. It essentially died in the same wave as personal blogs and other casualties of Web 2.

When you go back this was the norm. You go to irc, search in #5on5: high server on (counter-strike 1.6)

You either have a server and they come to you or you don't and message people. If they/you feel like are hacking go next. There were tons of servers where you had admins all the time.

Human admins still can only see the obvious spin/aimbots.

Companies took this from us as hosting your own servers is rarely an option these days and you rely on the company never shutting them down.

> If they/you feel like are hacking go next.

This here is why I find matchmaking is such a frustrating experience at high ELO compared to the old times. With an IRC scrim you aren't held hostage by blatant cheaters, you just leave - but on matchmaking, you cannot choose to forfeit and have to waste 30 minutes or be penalised.

I only play with a 5 stack so us choosing to leave doesn't ruin anyone's experience. I kept two CS accounts (same rank) purely so that we could skip the cooldown and requeue if the opponent had blatant cheaters/spinbots.

It's not that long ago this was the norm.

Yep, I remember. It was nice to play regularly on a server with names you came to recognise. That will never be the norm again though unfortunately. It still exists in the indie space, however, like for example on VR games such as Pavlov where the playerbase is too small for formal matchmaking.