Comment by Wowfunhappy

> For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players

Good skill matching is one of the most important advancement in gaming over the last few decades. Being able to consistently play against people who are fair competition for you makes the games so much more fun, especially if you are much better or much worse than the average player. In the old days, you could alternate between opponents that were no challenge at all and opponents you would have no chance against; both types of games get old really fast.

In some ways, good skill matching can alleviate the harm cheaters do; if the cheating makes them way better than everyone else, then good matchmaking should start to match them up only against other cheaters. In many ways, this is the ideal scenario - cheaters play against each other, and everyone else plays against people who are close in skill level.

That still exists in many games with server browsers. The game just goes through the server list to find a populated one with low latency and “official” settings (ie not knife only or modded).

Works basically the same as matchmaking does now, albeit in only matching on server quality and not player skill.

> However, I wonder if you could have that while still removing features that make cheating seem appealing. For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players.

This does not stop cheaters whatsoever. Anyone who played during the private server era of FPS in the late 90s/early 00s knows this; wallhacking, modified character models with big pointy spikes indicating player locations, aimbots, etc. ran rampant, even when nothing was on the line.

They could still have this with a campaign/story-mode or even a simple bot-mode.