This, this, this, this and this.

I remember people being GLUED to their favorite servers due to community reasons. In Italy we used to have hundreds, of which at least few dozen popular open community-driven servers.

Actually, server hosting CS instances was a thing, so each provider had their own to show they had the most performing, so you played for free, and to get the best thing people in the same country gathered around the same set of servers.

I to this day remember countless of player nicknames from these times, oddly, I don't remember some of my school teammates from the time.

SBMM on official servers for those who want to just jump into a game and are there for the game loop, alongside whatever other features the official servers might have enabled, like progression or item drops.

Alongside those, the ability to self-host servers for those who crave more of a community aspect and even things like custom modes or mods.

Since my hand eye coordination sucks, I’d hate playing without SBMM and being in games where I get stomped every time, especially when it comes to competitive shooters - playing CS or Valorant without ranks would be suffering.

On the other hand, discovering that even games like Enlisted have community servers running a zombie mod, or the endless modes of the Arma series is immensely cool. Or just the ability to have a more chill custom server if the main game’s population is toxic.

Sometimes you get wildcards like SPT-AKI where the modders give you more control over the game than the devs ever would. Either way, having any sort of control is better than giving it all up to a company that sees you as a bag of money to be squeezed.