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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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