The Dead Bahrain Server: A Two-Hub Solution for Africa, South Asia, and South ME

Hi everyone and the EA/Respawn Team,

With the recent physical infrastructure damage to the Bahrain AWS servers, a huge portion of the player base is effectively locked out of the game. Right now, if you're in Africa, the Middle East, India, or Pakistan, you're likely seeing -1 ping or 100% packet loss on the Bahrain server and are forced to connect to foreign servers with frustrating lag.

We get the business side of this and completely understand that North America and Europe have clusters of servers because that’s where the biggest player bases are. It makes sense to invest where the most people are to prevent crashes and instability. But right now, the current setup is failing everyone outside those regions. The Bahrain server has proven to be a failure, both geographically and in terms of reliability.

Instead of trying to revive the dead Bahrain node, this is an opportunity to rethink the approach entirely. A simple two-hub strategy could bring these fragmented player bases together into healthy matchmaking pools:

1. The Nairobi Hub (Replacing Bahrain): Right now, the player base is split between a non-functional Middle East server and the absence of a proper African one. Shifting Bahrain’s role to Nairobi, using the existing AWS infrastructure there, would act as a regional bridge that serves the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Southern Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman. This would merge two struggling populations into a single, active matchmaking pool with far better connection quality for everyone involved.
2. The Mumbai Hub: Players in South Asia, such as India and Pakistan, are currently stuck between a dead Bahrain server and a congested Singapore server. A dedicated hub here would remove the current bottleneck, giving players in the region a reliable alternative while at the same time capturing one of the biggest, fastest-growing gaming communities in the world.

It’s also worth addressing the idea that Lag Compensation makes these distances manageable. In practice, it doesn’t. In fast-paced modes like Wildcard, high ping and constant stuttering make the game frustrating and, at times, unplayable. No amount of netcode smoothing can compensate for being shot behind cover or having inputs delayed or ignored. Players affected by this aren’t asking for perfection, just a fair and consistent connection.

Maintaining a ghost server with empty queues isn’t just frustrating for players, it’s also inefficient. By replacing the failed Bahrain server with these two hubs, you'll likely fix the Matchmaking Loop where people don't queue because it's empty, and it's empty because no one queues.

We’re not asking for the extensive server coverage that some regions enjoy. We’re simply asking for two functional hubs so we can actually play the game we love on a level playing field.