30yo BF vet opinion (portal)

To follow up, my frustration with this has gotten me to make my first ever post on a forum for gaming lol. I truly do have a special place in my heart for battlefield and would love nothing more than to have a space to just enjoy it the way I want to outside of traditional MP sometimes. 

also one last thing….. bring back BF1 operations mode😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

People cheating is the number 1 issue by far. Every server is over run with them now.

I’d love for them to resolve that too. I don’t think amending the portal editor to the way it was in 2042 would take away from them fixing cheating though

As long as the game continues to be a grind (of course that won't change, because it is engagement and micro-transactions), people will continue to care most about XP, unlocks, and progression. As long as old XP farms continue to work (who knows why EA acts like they don't condone it, but refuse to take them down), the majority of portal will be that crap. As long as portal continues to be that crap, good portal can't exist. Good portal (the hosted experiences we remember from our past) can't exist because: 1) You can't find good stuff among all the garbage. 2) The good stuff you find usually is empty and requires too many people to start it, or has no progression or unlock XP. 3) The garbage is terribly wasteful of server capacity (1 person wastes 48 or 64 slots per server), and all the portal servers with complex multiplayer run like crap because of it.

What can un-kill portal? Give full progression, full unlocks, and 1 person start to ALL portal servers. If someone can solo start an XP farm and get full everything against 63 bots, there is no other experience as harmful or exploitive in comparison. Don't kill everything else. If you make everything have equal unlock progression and server-start difficulty, you hope that people will start engaging with fun and unique ACTUAL gaming experiences which EA claims they wish players would do more of.

EA clearly doesn't care. They don't listen. They aren't rational.

I have 7 portal experiences I made. They all took a lot of time to make, offer what isn't already in the game (hardcore, TDM, conquest small, etcetera), are an actual game that can be won or lost, are actually challenging and fun, but have no XP or progression. They are exactly the things that people claim they wish the game would be, but no one plays and they are empty. People need to stop pretending that they miss a server browser and miss hosted community experiences, and then do nothing to help keep it alive. Portal is all we have left of that experience; support it and engage with it, or stop complaining.

Since we're talking about what to do to make portal better...I happened to notice that under the "community" section on the main page of the game, the playlists Dice puts there actually seem to put you into persistent lobbies that are made from portal experiences. But those lobbies that you are placed in are not visible in the portal server browser. That seems like a poor decision and splits up the player base even further. It would be helpful for those lobbies to be visible in the portal server browser so people can join through there as well. Right now as things are, the player base is divided into 3 separate groups. The bulk of the player population plays through the regular matchmaking playlists. The second group is the portal server player population. And the third group are the people joining the playlists in the community section. There seems to be no reason to separate the community playlist lobbies from the portal lobbies since they can be hosted from the same experiences and are both persistent.

I think the advertised community experiences are not real community experiences. I think that is why they aren't in the server browser. They are usually made by "battlefieldofficial" and usually  have strange gameplay compromises that go against the supposed stated server objective. For example, a "hardcore" mode with non-hardcore health, and an "infantry-only" mode with tanks in some maps. They are oddly "highlighted" as community experiences on #FNB nights, even though they aren't made by the community and are the same experiences highlighted over and over again since the game was released.

I mean I don’t see why we can’t have both. I am indifferent as to the progression but just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I have a hard stance against it. I don’t know why everyone has to have it exactly the way they want it and ONLY that way. Regardless I don’t see it as a community fault as to why the servers aren’t populated because as you said you can’t even find the **bleep** things. All I am trying to say is for a quick easy update, bring back the basic portal editing options we had available to us in 2042 and don’t require real players to start. I just want somewhere within the BF6 space to have a laid back custom experience is all. That’s my gripe and I understand you have yours and I do truly hope those issues you have are resolved as well. 

Yeah, but they give you a button and you can choose to host those exact experiences instead of matchmaking through them...and when you host them, they end up in the server browser. I just looked in the browser and one guy has the same Dice official infantry conquest one hosted even right now. The only real difference I see is that right now when you join through the playlist, dice is hosting them and not having them appear in the server browser like it does when you or I choose to host them. I'm just saying they should also appear in the browser when dice hosts them too.