You don't have a better way. You have a nostalgic memory of how games should be played which doesn't match what people in a modern audience expect. It's like saying the solution to cell phones tracking you is to use a landline, because that's how we used to do things.
The truth is that UT2004 sold 234,451 units over its life according to Wikipedia.
The Division sold over 10,000,000 copies in the first weekend.
The requirements change drastically when you have a larger audience.
Primarily driven by my utter disgust for modern monetization mechanics, corporate greed and gambling. Cheaters, IMHO, are an inevitable side effect of combining gamification with gambling, with no barriers to entry, and with removing social barriers of entry.
> The requirements change drastically when you have a larger audience.
The market has exploded in the 12 years between UT2004 and The Division.
Yes, and you can’t assert that it didn’t happen at least in part due to efforts to make games more accessible.
You couldn’t release a game like UT2004 today with the same UX and expect competitive sales. Even if you did, the experience would scale very poorly.
You still see this with modern day servers. Modded GTA V, FiveM, had additional anticheat even before the unmodded game added anticheat. Part of the appeal of CS2 servers, Face-IT and ESEA, is the additional anticheats.
I got a better way... just look at the past. Back in ye goode olde UT2004 times, there was no random matchmaking / ranking bullshit that removed the social element, game licenses cost money, people ran their own servers, and if you pissed off server mods enough, no matter if you were a cheater, a suspected cheater, or just an asshole, your serial got banned - sometimes, across a fleet of servers that shared ban lists. Cheating had costs associated.
But of course, that means you can't lure in whales with free to play games and loot them via microtransactions any more...