Feedback: Official Servers Only vs Private Admin-Run Servers Reasoning:

1st of all, if they are paying for the server they can do what they want . You have a choice to play there or not.

2nd  "game quickly gets filled with stacked squads, closed little groups" You have that now on the official servers lol. With no admins or team balance to break it up.....

Progress_Cloud​ 

Hey, there

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We appreciate your thoughts on the game servers. We’re passing this along to the team so they can review it and continue to improve the game for players.

For now, please keep an eye out in-game and look for updates on the BF6 Game Info Hub and on X - Battlefield Comms 

Thanks

Not throwing shade but you are probably new to the BF series if you think Official servers are "fair" but I think I can interpret the point you're trying to make.

Just for clarity, there are no "private servers"  in BF6. The last official game to feature a traditional paid Rent-A-Server Program (RSP) was Battlefield 1. Since, EA has pivoted to Portal only where players can spin up a "custom server" for others to join. These are still hosted by EA and the AWS servers they license. No one other than EA paid for the server space. The server browser people are going to get may help with map selection and rotation but they will NOT be the same as private servers from BF1 and previous. It won't be long until people realize this really isn't what they are hoping for. 

Now, the contradictory statement that Official servers are more fair... I'll expand the scope to any main stream arcade FPS genre like BF and counter the concept that Official servers are more fair than Private servers. Official servers are NOT monitored or policed by anyone. EA relies solely on their anticheat to stop game breaking unfairness. Server admins (good admins) have the ability to respond to multiple claims of unfairness or toxicity in many forms. Server admins have the ability to watch and monitor in real time a suspected cheater and remove/ban them from the server. Ensure they stop impacting the server they rent, uphold a reputation and quality standard that usually higher than EA's, and make adjustments to the server if there appears to be an imbalance or population drop for whatever reason.

Progress_Cloud wrote:

Because once private servers are allowed into the main ecosystem, the game quickly gets filled with stacked squads, closed little groups, and admin abuse.

If EA would have implemented an actual Join as a Squad feature or allow you to join on your friends, as they had in previous BF games, this problem would be very less impactful. Even now the matchmaking algorithm fails to balance the teams. Furthermore, private servers would often configure the server to scramble the teams while keeping squad of friends intact. This effectively helped with match balancing and keeping friends together. Because it's a private server, that means a human being / admin set it up that way. This was a common requirement for private servers in BF3 and BF4 and the private server community is the reason these titles are still playable today.

Progress_Cloud wrote:

Too many servers turn into places where “server owners” act like emperors, using their power to kick, ban, or control players however they want. That kind of environment is unhealthy for the game and terrible for the long-term player experience.

💯Yes. We saw this too, and I agree with you. There are definitely BADMINS out there that will abuse their fake power. The benefit of having private servers and a functional server browser is that you could filter servers that were modded or had different rules. Come across a badmin, ensure your filter excluded this server. Personally, I have only ever experience badmins a handful of times during my BF3 and 4 career. They do exist so, your concerns are valid.

I remember one time, a server had a limit on snipers. If the server was capped at that limit and you spawn in as a sniper, you were warned to switch. If you didn't, you were admin-killed automatically and a message was sent telling you why. I was on this server as another class and picked up one of the one-shot sniper rifles on top of the hotel building on Hainan Resort. I was shocked to see that it was still laying there so I grabbed it. Within 15 seconds, I was admin-killed with a warning that the sniper cap was reached and I couldn't use it. Did I think this was dumb? Absolutely. But in all fairness, if I wanted to play on that server where they considered class balances, I couldn't act like another sniper but play as a different class. To me, this made sense so I wasn't upset. I was surprised but not upset.

Progress_Cloud wrote:

A fair, stable multiplayer game needs consistent rules, transparent matchmaking, and equal treatment for everyone. If DICE wants to support a server browser, that should mean official servers only — not private rule sets, not admin-controlled sandboxes, and not a system that lets abuse become part of the core experience.

While I understand the point you are trying to make, the conflicting part about this statement is that EA and DICE are giving the majority of the player base exactly what they asked for in a server browser. Here, you could find matches EXACTLY how YOU want to play. Everyone can see Official servers and Custom, Portal servers (not private, those do not exist here). But beware, Portal, as of right now, has a server tick rate of 30hz (thats pathetically low) and you absolutely will see more netcode problems than on their current matchmaking on non-Portal servers. I played on private servers that were in excess of 120+hz and man, those servers were buttery smooth and rarely did I have strange netcode problems. Oh, and maybe, we will see the option to have input-based matches only. If a player has to do this for EA because EA won't listen to their community, its a bad sign.

I am a little hesitant to cheer for this browser server if EA and DICE aren't going to improve the performance of Portal. You think people complain about Portal now with all of the poor performance and EXP gain restrictions, wait till the server browser is released and Portal is thrust into the forefront of gamer's angst against the game's ability to provide a satisfying experience. IMO, EA and DICE won't do anything about Portal and the "server browser" and kneecap it by not improving the QOL of Portal servers and it dies due to a lack of support. Then, players will simply accept what they have and stop complaining.

I believe, with more transparency into the game modes we all want to play, we can fine tune how we want to play the game as a whole. The server browser will temporarily fill the gap. But for how long, not sure yet but I am willing to bet not for very long. I anticipate that players that make custom Portal servers and mark them as persistent will be simple rotations of popular maps and modes. If EA and DICE improve the quality of Portal, its going to be a win. If they do not improve the performance, they are planning for it to fail.

To end my novel, EA should allow private lease servers again. The community has already proven it can police itself while improving fairness through the private server community unmanaged by EA. They won't allow private leasing because it takes money away from them, preventing players from moving onto their next product.

I’ve never understood why anyone still supports opening up privately managed servers.

Today, almost every successful online game is built around official matchmaking for a reason: it gives players the fairest, most consistent, and least frustrating experience possible. Do you really want to queue into some so-called “community server,” play for a while, and then get kicked just because an admin doesn’t like you, or because your K/D is too high, or because you got too many kills?

I’m not new to Battlefield. I’ve seen far too many of these so-called “emperor servers” in the Asian Battlefield 1 scene.

They usually come with all kinds of absurd rules:

• If you do not pay VIP fees to the admin, you do not get to play comfortably.
• Weapons like shotguns or snipers may be banned simply because the admin does not like them.
• Get too many kills, and you get kicked.
• Have too high a K/D, and you get kicked.
• Kill the admin or the admin’s friends too many times, and you get kicked.
• The admin’s friends are allowed to “farm fresh noobs” freely, while regular players are forced to obey a long list of restrictions.

Even worse, many private servers freely modify core gameplay rules. For example, they may shorten vehicle respawn times, which makes anti-vehicle play almost meaningless. You work hard to destroy a tank, and then another one comes back again a few seconds later. At that point, it is no longer a normal Battlefield experience. It is just the admin’s personal playground.

Some people say private servers help with balance.

In reality, the opposite is usually true.

Most admins are neither capable nor willing to truly balance both teams. They usually care more about whether they and their friends are having fun than whether the server is actually fair. What people call “manual balancing” often turns into admin abuse and favoritism.

Team balance should be handled by the official system, not by some server emperor with kick permissions.

From the perspective of the game’s long-term health, privately managed servers are very harmful.

They lead to:

• a worse experience for new players,
• fragmentation into small cliques,
• widespread admin abuse,
• broken balance from custom rule sets,
• and players having to constantly sift through servers just to find a normal match.

Battlefield 2042’s official matchmaking was actually already pretty good. Battlefield 6’s anti-cheat is also gradually improving, although DMA cheats and AI cheats still need to be dealt with more effectively. The overall direction is correct.

Privately managed servers are not the future. They belong to a past era.

I support the return of an official server browser, because it lets players choose maps and modes for themselves. But I strongly oppose putting privately managed servers into the official server browser system.

Fast matchmaking plus an official server browser should be the baseline.

Battlefield does not need to go back to the era of VIP privileges, admin abuse, and arbitrary kicks. Private admin-controlled servers will eventually end up in the trash heap of gaming history, while a fair and transparent official server system is what truly benefits the long-term health of the game.

Private servers help build communities around the game. There are still private BF1, BF4 servers running that are very popular. I think it is a great idea simply because you can get rid of the cheaters, exploiters and disrespectful players. The communities that I have been a part of have forums where issues are handled. Some of the better communities, the admin had private forums to vote on weather or not a ban was justified or not. So it wasn't just one person being an emperor as you termed it. The banned player would request the ban be lifted just like here on EA forums.  The person who banned this player would also have to justify their reason for the ban, either video proof and statistical proof. 

The pay to play is usually tied to reserved slots since most of the private servers I have played on were very popular and if you wanted to play then you assisted the owner with money that pays for the server.  

"Cheaters" 

Yeah, anyone who kills the admin LOL