In the good old days I was a member of a Day of Defeat clan. We had regular matchups with other clans that various members met through online forums or from random, public play. It was extremely rare to match up with another clan only to find out they were jerks / cheats / griefers. It maybe only happened once or twice.

In between clan matches I would practice by myself on public servers. In my eyes, there were only players that were better than me and players that were worse. They could have better through either skill or through cheating — hax. Either way, I didn’t gain anything from playing against them so I would just try another server.

Eventually you’d find one with a couple of guys from another clan hanging out (“[VD8 Bros] jojo” and “[VD8 Bros] dEvin” etc.), join them, and eventually more people would arrive. Someone really good would inevitably show up with very little social skills (it was mostly text chat) and we’d eventually combine these two priors into deciding they were cheating, and kick them off.

If someone really good showed up and had good, friendly, amusing chat then we’d try and play with them again somehow!