Even back when the lobbies were p2p there was still infrastructure on the developer side to handle the matchmaking, stats and progression. I’m sure the load is much less but the multiplayer experience isn’t as good. It would also be pretty demanding for some games that have huge lobbies like battlefield

If you get all the way into the game then go offline I believe it still works. I’ll have to test again but I do recall being able to play without internet after resuming from sleep

Oh I was saying with the free mode of esxi there are limits placed on the VM resources, not the host. It can be a bit of a pain to get the updates and patches if you don’t pay for the license though. If you get a enterprise server (dell r730 etc) then you’d be able to get the custom dell package from their site for updates but it’s a pain lol

Depending on what you are trying to run those should be an okay start

Basic functionality is probably good for most people. I believe the biggest limit I hit was for the resources. Believe it was 8 vCore /8GB RAM on a single VM. Most of the other vSphere/vSAN and orchestrator stuff is probably beyond home lab needs

Here’s a wiki article about the incident they are talking about. Basically it’s believed that in order to get money to arm rebels in Nicaragua the CIA assisted with importing cocaine to the US and specifically primarily black neighborhoods fueling the crack epidemic.