Just as a small side note:

I still play some Battlefield 4 from time to time. Custom servers are awful.

You'll randomly get kicked because you didn't pay for a VIP slot, randomly killed because only 5 snipers per team are allowed and randomly kicked because the admin didn't like the particular gun you're using.

I can see why game developers would (and should) prevent that.

If i remember correctly BF4 follows the same logic of BF3, meaning that "Custom" servers are actually running only on hostings that EA has given license to, so at best the administrator has the ability to manage the players and not the game itself.

The only thing that may dissuade game creators from creating openly available dedicated server software is that they will need to let everyone access the list of servers(like Valve), so they would get traffic without any kind of ROI.

Interestingly I have the opposite experience with the previous battlefield 3. There are still several active servers, all of them are generally fun to play with no weird rule sets. I remember in the earlier years of the game some servers had rules like no sniper and you were automatically kicked if using one but that was made clear in the server title.

Nothing can explain it to you like experience. It's nice to be principled and see the world as black and white, but the overall theme I was trying to portray was that everything is trade-offs.

You can't have your cake and eat it too here, everything costs, and player experience is king.

Cheating happens, we don't want it to, but we do the best we can with what we have, and if it's not enough: play on a platform that does not allow memory modification and injection. It's damn impossible to "secure" a client, and when we do people cry about DRM. (I'm not saying that some DRM isn't to "prevent piracy" and I'm a free software advocate so I hate DRM, I'm just saying that if we included DRM in our game people would go nuts about it- but it would help solve the issue here).

AAA titles get hundreds of millions of dollars of development effort, and they can't even bother do basic things for the community and instead thwart community efforts. The problem is that the studios have been bought up by corrupt corporate bean counters who just see video games as a product to sell and not a passion they share in. Educated consumers are the bane of sleazy businessmen, and the salvation of honest ones.

It's sad that you think we're "out to get you", we're just making games.

Consider the widely acknowledged fact tat the working hours are brutal, the pay is quite low for C/C++ programmers, the average experience in the industry before burnout is 5 years.

Nobody would do this if the passion wasn't there. This industry basically couldn't exist without the passion for making games.

And, every time we fail we're yelled at for being incompetent. Every trade off we make is derided by people who never actually tried to make something like this.

Every time we try to increase the amount we're paid, or set a decent working schedule (longer development times mean more salaries because working on a project longer) we're told that we're "sleazy business men" trying to make a profit.

Like I said in another comment, the only way for you to get "better" games is to set your expectations for games lower than AAA (IE: stop buying AAA's), make us slaves or pay more.

And people (in aggregate) do not want to pay more.

> Every time we try to increase the amount we're paid, or set a decent working schedule (longer development times mean more salaries because working on a project longer) we're told that we're "sleazy business men" trying to make a profit.

Who's this "we"? The workers or the shareholders? Is there any unionizing effort on the videogame industry?

There is no need to secure the client because all the things the cheaters can mess with should be server side to begin with. DRM doesn't solve the problem. It only makes the problem more attractive because it lets you avoid the real solution. The end result is buggier games because the project manager can get away with shipping half assed crap.

I'm saying the trade-offs we make are known. It's impossible to do everything. If we could do what you want us to do on the server the game would be 1/10th of what it is because each frame would take 2 seconds to render otherwise.

But, I’m hiring. If you think you can do better. I’ll put in a good word.

https://www.massive.se/job/gameplay-programmer-7439997104051...

https://www.massive.se/job/senior-system-programmer-74399969...

Action games can't be server side fully. Latency would make the game unworkable. So you'll get wall hacks and speed hackers, and aim bots, and trigger bots. You can ban them post facto but its a continual cat and mouse game with detection and avoidance.