I mean I don’t totally disagree with your statements, but how much playtime do you have in NMS? I have 85 hours and I am totally satisfied aka not thinking of returning regarding new patches with new “content”. Does that make it a bad game? I don’t think so. Is it the best spacesim ever, I don’t think so either. But it gets some features really nicely done:
like the feeling of and endless universe where you can travel wherever you want,
the exploration part where you are looking for your favourite planet ecosystem (it NEEDS dinosaurs!)
the crafting part, although I no clue how it changed to some years ago
starting and landing on planets (hi Shitfield)
But I agree the core gameplay loop is quite shallow, I see it more as a “light” sandbox game.
I doubt that, I mean show me a proper working anti cheat which isn’t deeply rooted into the system as this Valorant bullshit? Don’t even know how good that one is actually working. I just think there should be more focus from players and general attention that cheaters are bad for sales, because people don’t want to spend money on games where cheaters are free to prevail.
I also think with CS2 Valve has a big motivating factor to make this classic one which is cheater free. Also why aren’t third party games able to use VAC?
I really like the community driven moderation of playerbase is a good suggestion. For games like Hunt: Showdown and any other game with just lobbies, its not working though.
server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
By which information? I have no clue what Northstar is, but if you ban by IP or MAC, its pointless.
Distinguishing between a good player and a bot probably won’t be that hard. A simple aimbot would probably fire exactly at a target’s (0, 0) coordinate,
bots are way more elaborate than that, even 20 years ago there were randomization patterns.
I mean AI sounds like a legit idea. In the past e.g. battle.net from Blizzard was also just looking for “patterns”. And AI could be much better at that. The question is, how do you get the required information without having any clientside info? To distinguish between a good player and a bot would be very very time consuming to train an AI on that level.