The reasons grooming standards are enforced are the same reasons anything is enforced.

Conviction for sexual assault in the military is an automatic dishonorable discharge and loss of all benefits as a minimum sentence. However, while the military generally has a slightly higher conviction rate than civilian courts, you don't have to be convicted to have career altering or even ending consequences.

The bar to convict is also lower. It doesn't require a unanimous vote, there's no statute of limitations, and you're generally going to face immediate consequences once accused.

Shaving waivers have been so abused it's a running joke in the army.

It's still trivially easy to have a doctor get you a waiver.

Tattoos don't matter unless they're in a particular set of extremes.

Marijuana also really doesn't matter, it's easily waiverable if you didn't have a chronic problem recently.

Harassment is so heavily punished in the military I don't think you're informed on this topic beyond a few wild headlines.

It's extremely common knowledge that harassing women will ruin your military career very quickly.

The raising of the recruitment age has nothing to with "desperation" (recruitment has been at a high) and everything to do with people living longer/healthier lives and the military has been handing out age waivers for years.

The max enlistment age has been de facto 42ish for a while, they're just getting rid of pointless paper work and obstacles that don't make sense.

The goal is delivering a useful product to someone, which just requires secure enough, optimized enough, efficient enough code.

Some see the security, optimization, or efficiency of the code itself as the goal. They'll be replaced.

Pulling out a few games with less than 5000 players globally isn't remotely comparable to having hundreds of thousands of players daily.

It's amplified even more for games that have a global ranking system and a professional competitive scene.

Personally I just hope Netflix takes interest in the UCI mountain bike racing and does a better job with it.

What it tells you most of all is popularity and incentive to cheat. Cast a big enough net and you'll inevitably find cheaters. The bigger the net, the more cheaters you'll collect.

A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.

Rust remains maybe the last true community game that's just solid all the way through where the studio is good to its players and doesn't patronize and betray them. I can have the sort of fun I would have had 20 years ago in Rust, and everything else feels like monocultural slop by comparison.

I wish more of my friends wanted to play it, and wish I had more time for it.

You reject the premise that such control is necessary for your idea of fun.

But millions of players enjoy ranked matchmaking enough that without aggressive anti cheat you will wind up with cheaters.

I hate the root kits as well, but if you spend any time playing Valorant vs CS, you will see the difference. If I play CS consistently I'll get cheaters once or twice a week. In Valorant it's almost unheard of by comparison. It sucks, but that's just what's happening.

Do I wish I at least had the option in Valorant or whatever to host a server? Absolutely. Do I think they use the rootkits maliciously? No, generally not. Do I think studios are disincentivized to provide server hosting due to DLC or microtransactions? Definitely. But I also think there's often also a game integrity component. All of these things can be true simultaneously.

Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of major titles.

No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports earnings.

It's the same phenomenon you see in many sectors.

Access is democratized and the friction/barrier to play is dramatically lowered/free, and the localization is diluted or non existent and just a monoculture.

The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.

And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.