So I agree with the overall thrust of your argument here in that I far preferred the world of casual servers you could hop on with your friends, make goofy rules, ban whoever you wanted, etc., and I see how dissolving that into shared servers with automated matchmaking makes certain anti-cheat measures infeasible.

What I’m not sure of is to what degree the new shared servers/auto-matchmaking pattern is due to catering to competitive gamers? Is that really the reason?

(I legitimately have no idea so I’m curious how you’ve come to this conclusion)