Let me correct myself, "Death of community servers".When BF5 came out with their "We give you what you asked for" server where we dident ask for what we got at all....Not having dedicated servers means noone will really find servers they really like and where they can start up the game > Join the server and play for some hours. (DIce, why do you think BF3 and BF4 still have servers?)Even Jack Frags said you need to fix this, by starting your own server and when you need to go to bed you leave, when the last person left your server its gone, so you need to start one up and hope ppl who maybe enjoyed playing with you last night comes back and they probably wont.I preordered, tested the beta, cancelled my preorder to see how portal should be, and yes, it is indeed really promising but whats kills a "community" is the lack of support for the servers and one of the biggest reason it will fail sooner or later is just becuse of how lazy or just so save as much money as possible and screw your players over by not giving YOUR soon not to be "community".There is so much more I could write but I told them this like I said even when "community servers" came to BF5... Its sad to see how a company is so out of touch with their playerbase.

Portal definitely needs some sort of rental server system for clans and communities to run their own set ups or even if they just want to run their own default server of the base game. Otherwise it will be even more of a wasted potential than BF5 custom games were.

@Fringerunner wrote:@ShevermiN Want to post some sources for those numbers, I'd be interested in taking a look at those statistics.Hi @Fringerunner and @ShevermiN ,Happy to join your chat on player populations in dedicated thread for that purpose, both across the different platforms and also across the various BF games! 👍Please note that your above chat on that subject can still be substantiated with the real matter of fact numbers from aka "Battlefield Tracker", which kept all the numbers on record until EA shut down our API interface. (embarrassed when BF4 started outshining BF1, with more players on BF4 despite being a much older game...? 😀) Battlefield 4 Population History (battlefieldtracker.com)And then select timeframe to be 'all history', wait a bit and you will see the full player population history by platform by month across the years April 2015 to Sept 2019.

@losthunter340 I have to agree. There is a reason why BF3 and BF4 servers are still active. They are dedicated servers with active admins, the maps we love, the friends we like.If EA is serious about Portal, eventually some server rental option should be available.

@TheFireOfTitan wrote:@losthunter340I have to agree. There is a reason why BF3 and BF4 servers are still active. They are dedicated servers with active admins, the maps we love, the friends we like.If EA is serious about Portal, eventually some server rental option should be available.Though I agree with your principles, then I suggest we wait and see how EA practically now implement the server hosting functionality in the Portal!Reason I say this is because EA have said that they will implement a delay-function, so even though servers may go empty for players, then it will remain visible for a period of time before it disappears. If so, and if this is at least a 24h period, then I think really we have all we need for also succeeding with the Portal servers as offered here for free by EA without we have somebody having to pay for them on monthly/tri-monthly basis.I run several BF4 servers still these days and they stay active because they are popular, despite its many days between I ever go on them myself. And mind you, the BF4 servers goes dead instantly for the last 3+ years if there are no active players on them! (I can see that I even have 10 players in queue right now to join my 64-player Metro server here Friday mid afternoon European time)Now with the Portal we also have the option to assign co-admins to help keeping them running well. So if we have like 20-30 helpers signed up (old BF4 we only could assign 20), then I don't really see what a 'dedicated paid-for server' can do more than what we otherwise already can now with the Portal servers we get?I can share with you that it was no easy thing to get 'dedicated paid-for servers' up and running in the past either! It took literally many many months before they could stay populated over a day. Typically 6-9 months before you first time had them filling up to 64 players! And 9-15 months before they had enough players to keep them alive over a night 24/7. So yes, I am sure we will hear a lot of complaining these next many months where players are complaining about their servers not populating up with human players.Heck, we often still see players coming to the BF4 forum and blasting EA because the player now pay to rent a server and then blaming EA for that the server is not filling up to 64 players on it. 😂🤣😂The main reason why BF3 and BF4 servers are still active is because both games are still great fun to play!

So, I am not sure if i completely misunderstood the whole concept here, but servers - or experiences - will exists as URLs and/or codes, which means that anyone can keep a list of servers for example for a clan, and if anyone access one such URL, it will spin up that server/experience.So is it not the case that these will also be listed, even though empty? It is just that there won't be any empty server wasting energy waiting for someone to connect?So the whole empty server problem would be a non-issue?Please educate me if i am off point here.

Not including dedicated server is the death of this game

27 Replies

Noodlesocks
4 years ago
Portal definitely needs some sort of rental server system for clans and communities to run their own set ups or even if they just want to run their own default server of the base game. Otherwise it will be even more of a wasted potential than BF5 custom games were.
ShevermiN
4 years ago
@losthunter340 If you can't make a community server with these set of tools that DICE have offered to us with portal then you really don't have a community.

There are still BF3 and BF4 servers but they didn't save Battlefield there the reason on PC the population never got much above 50K daily peaks.
ST1GUS
Seasoned Hotshot
4 years ago
@ShevermiNI take it you are talking about BF1/BF5 with the numbers you give, perhaps if there was consistency in the BF franchise then maybe the players who are still playing BF3/4 may have moved up to the newer titles
ShevermiN
4 years ago
@ST1GUS The last year 2 years of BF4 before the release of BF1 daily player numbers for PC were 30K the total playerbase across all 5 platforms was around 100K.. People need to take the rose coloured rear view glasses off.
ST1GUS
Seasoned Hotshot
4 years ago
@ShevermiN So almost 30% were on PC? that is quite a fair amount for just one platform, what were the other four platforms individually bringing in then? also if you added the PC players from bf4 who did not move up to bf1 how many then? just out of interest 😉
ShevermiN
4 years ago
@ST1GUSThere was a BF4 player count page up for years which clearly showed that PS4 and XBox1 had between 25K and 30K daily peaks, PS3 about 15K and Xbox360 about 12K plus the 30K PC players and that were the BF4 numbers for the last year or so up until BF1 launched.
I remember it well because I ran the AN Hardcore 32p mixedmode server right up until BF1 launched ??

After BF1 player numbers have been hard to find, but console numbers I believe have been greater than PC numbers.
mesterKG
4 years ago
I understand where the OP is coming from and agree that persistent servers would be the preferred solution. If I remember correctly, DICE did talk about a paid service for the community games in BFV, but it never happened. Maybe because the community games came so late in BFV's life and wasn't used so much anyways. Maybe Portal will give us this eventually. We can only hope.
That said, with a bit of creativity I think communities can get something close to persistent servers. With Discord and sharing of the so-called Experiences, a comunity could easily always have a server running. If a player logs on and not finding their server, he just spins it up from the shared Experience code, and post that he has done this in Discord. If enough members, this will approximate to persistent servers.
One argument against persistent servers.. is climate change :-) .. Having servers run while empty is a waste of resources and should be avoided!
mesterKG
4 years ago
Also, this talk of player counts is a derailment of the OPs discussion, methinks.
Fringerunner
Seasoned Ace
4 years ago
@ShevermiN Want to post some sources for those numbers, I'd be interested in taking a look at those statistics.
CyberDyme
4 years ago
@Fringerunner wrote:
@ShevermiN Want to post some sources for those numbers, I'd be interested in taking a look at those statistics.
Hi @Fringerunner and @ShevermiN ,
Happy to join your chat on player populations in dedicated thread for that purpose, both across the different platforms and also across the various BF games! 👍
Please note that your above chat on that subject can still be substantiated with the real matter of fact numbers from aka "Battlefield Tracker", which kept all the numbers on record until EA shut down our API interface. (embarrassed when BF4 started outshining BF1, with more players on BF4 despite being a much older game...? 😀)
Battlefield 4 Population History (battlefieldtracker.com)
And then select timeframe to be 'all history', wait a bit and you will see the full player population history by platform by month across the years April 2015 to Sept 2019.