Our Strict Consistency Checking, Fairness vs Fun and the limitation of mods

As pointed out by the recent thread here. It seems the necessary anti-cheat is doing more harm than it is actually helping. Consistency checking as we all know, prevents naughty players from playing with altered game files and is supposed to stop players from seeing bright pink skulks through walls and having built in aimbots. This sounds great and all until you realize the same bad players can still bypass that system, even moreso, the system adds a huge toll in the loading of game assets, sometimes adding minutes onto loading maps.

I can understand the desire to reduce cheating, you can have that in pro games if you want, but it's being detrimental to public gameplay and the player modding community.

Alongside increased load times by minutes, players are very limited in the modding potential of their mod friendly game. Take for example, the NS1 Knife, something which makes no difference to other players, but limited by consistency checking so only server operators can choose to allow it. Things like this reduces the community modding interest, if no one can use it, even themselves, why would they make the effort on creating something besides the usual weapon texture mod.

I'm probably just being nostalgic at this point, but when I look back to the ns1 days with great modding communities and the nsarmslab, I'm just a little sad that ns2 stepped away from it's original modding community.

This isn't meant to be a complaint as much as it is a plea, some gorges just wanna have fun.