Blizzard bans 250,000 Overwatch 2 cheaters, says its AI that analyses voice chat is warning naughty players and can often 'correct negative behaviour immediately'

Dedicated servers ran by the community with a server browser to find games/servers.
Really the golden age of multiplayer.

Found a nice server that runs well, chill and well moderated? add it to your favorites.
No lobbies, well.. technically the whole server was the lobby, kinda.
No progression unlocks bullshit.
No ranking. No waiting on matchmaking. Just play.
No AI spying on every thing you say or do.
Maybe a "SIR this is a Christian server, so swearing will not be tolerated" or other warning of some kind now and then, even on games like Counterstrike.

Eventually, you'd get to know people, kinda like how you might start recognizing names here on lemmy.
You'd make friends, rivals, etc.
I miss those times.

I got into Titanfall 2 pretty late (like last month) and waiting 10 minutes to even get into a lobby is just annoying.
As opposed to joining a server and playing non stop on there.

It's even less costs to the publisher than to host and scale on their own because the community is running your servers.
But then they can't pull the plug to force people on a new release.
They can't spy on as much shit.
They can't sell as much private data.
It's probably easier to sell microtransactions this way too.

In a way... gaming was decentralized. I miss it.

Active moderation isn't spying but using an AI is? The only reason those self-hosted community servers didn't have problems was because they (usually) had active admins to see bad behavior and take action. This is merely automating that so a real human being doesn't have to be there watching.

Scroll under Team Fortress 2 a few spaces.

There it is... right where it belongs.