From tjhorner on this same thread
"Anubis doesn't target crawlers which run JS (or those which use a headless browser, etc.) It's meant to block the low-effort crawlers that tend to make up large swaths of spam traffic. One can argue about the efficacy of this approach, but those higher-effort crawlers are out of scope for the project."
So its meant/preferred to block low effort crawlers which can still cause damage if you don't deal with them. a 3 second deterrent seems good in that regard. Maybe the 3 second deterrent can come as in rate limiting an ip? but they might use swath's of ip :/
Anubis exists specifically to handle the problem of bots dodging IP rate limiting. The challenge is tied to your IP, so if you're cycling IPs with every request, you pay dramatically more PoW than someone using a single IP. It's intended to be used in depth with IP rate limiting.
As much as I reminisce about the days of private servers for Quake/2/3, UT99, CS1.6, etc., saying this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works. Some games would simply not be possible without public matchmaking; I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going. Even getting 11 other people to run a game of Overwatch or CS would be a pain. Other games need public matchmaking to have a fair ranking system. You go onto say ranking is "weaponised" but, ranking is a feature, and a lot of people like that feature.
> However, it does mean that the big publishers wouldn't have control over everything a player does. Getting them to agree to that is probably the real hard problem.
The demand for anticheat, and matchmaking/ranking systems, are entirely player-driven, not publisher-driven. If developers and publishers could get away with only implementing player-managed servers and letting players deal with cheaters, they would! It's a lot less work for them.
As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster. I remember needing to install some anti-cheat crap when I signed up for Brood War's private ICCUP ladder.
Squad has 100 player games, and despite its anticheat having well-known bypasses, I don't see a lot of hacked client cheating. Why? Because I play on servers that consistently have a couple people online during the hours I play that ban anybody who cheats.
Community servers have a lot more moderators than the game devs could possibly afford, because they can build trust with volunteers.