> It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing
I ran servers for a lot of games. It was often difficult to ban people from playing. First off, someone with ban permissions would have to actually be online at the time. So often nothing would happen at all, you'd just have to leave and find a different server. Second, one could get banned, often just change their IP or use a different CD key or whatever other identifier the game used, and hop back on with a new identity.
Meanwhile discoverability of similarly skilled matches were a challenge, along with actually playing with a group of friends against new people. Its not some perfect panacea, there are a lot of things people disliked about picking private servers to play on.
All of this is hard but solvable at least for some genres, with the help of the platform and game devs. A decade+ ago, I ran servers for several PvP sandbox games, we've been one of the major EU hubs. This was pretty complicated - tons of custom observability tooling, a community with 24/7 mods, investigations, mod transparency, etc. The IDs were partially solved by Steam, the rest was handled by player behavior tracking and reputation.
We also had skill-separated servers. Casual ones had votebans for teams and players that were too organized/skilled/abusive, with case by case mod approval. Anarchy servers had nearly zero rules and were absolutely cutthroat and toxic but fair, you always knew what you were signing up for. They even had mods temporarily banning players for whining.
Cheaters never lasted long in our servers, including returning ones. Running a dedicated server takes some dedication. Know the game and people you're doing this for.
I ran servers for a lot of games. It was often difficult to ban people from playing. First off, someone with ban permissions would have to actually be online at the time. So often nothing would happen at all, you'd just have to leave and find a different server. Second, one could get banned, often just change their IP or use a different CD key or whatever other identifier the game used, and hop back on with a new identity.
Meanwhile discoverability of similarly skilled matches were a challenge, along with actually playing with a group of friends against new people. Its not some perfect panacea, there are a lot of things people disliked about picking private servers to play on.