EA Survey: Share Your Thoughts on Battlefield 2042

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@OskooI_007 wrote:

Only one question asked about persistent servers, and it mentions server rentals. Which to me suggests DICE doesn't view map rotation and persistent servers/lobbies as a highly requested and sought after feature.

Looks like they plan on continuing to use Battle Royale style matchmaking, where lobbies are disbanded at the end of every round and player thrown into a new lobby that's probably playing the same map as the old lobby they were just in.

Bummer. I know Battle Royale style matchmaking is great for saving money on server hosting fees, but non-persistent lobbies don't work well in game modes like conquest and breakthrough where customers desire map rotations and lobbies that stay together through those map rotations.

There's something to be said about the social gaming aspect of persistent lobbies that seems to have been lost in the era of Battle Royale games. Different game modes require different lobby structures. For example, map rotation usually isn't a problem for Battle Royale lobbies because most only have one map in rotation at a time...

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I'm not sure that's a justified conclusion. Battlefield hasn't done rented servers since BF1 - a 5 year old game. Even then, the servers were hosted by EA/DICE. This means that independently hosted rental servers haven't been a thing since BF4, which came out in 2013. EA/DICE clearly haven't been interested in that for a long time.

This doesn't mean they plan to continue with a pure matchmaking approach - the BFV style semi-persistent server would address many of the issues raised by players, such as squads being disbanded at the end of every round.

I personally would love to see persistent, player-run servers in the game. After BFV and its community games feature, I just don't see it happening. EA/DICE don't want to pass the costs of running a server onto the players, because they don't want the players to have the kind of control that they once had, while they don't want to pay for persistent servers.

The problem with Portal is the same problem that community games had - it's an order of magnitude more difficult to build a comminuty around a server that isn't running 24/7. EA/DICE aren't passing the hosting costs on to players, but they're effectively asking players to pay to run their own server (electricity) while also preventing the vast majority of players from doing much else with the machine they choose to use to "host" the server - BF2042 is a very CPU-intensive game. How many customers have a spare machine they're happy to leave running 24/7 with an instance of 2042 running? I suspect that the answer is "lol".