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Tykadian's avatar
Tykadian
Newcomer
6 hours ago

Still no server browser?

Battlefield 6 promised a server browser - in the form of portal. That's not what the playerbase asked for, and people were asking for it in battlefield 2042. We need an official matchmaking server browser, similar to the one present in bf4 or bf1. 
I'll cover why battlefield needs a server browser, while critiquing portal's shortcomings.

The Problem

I know some people see the portal server browser as the solution, but not everyone wants to play on portal experiences. They want official matchmaking, and to be able to pick out servers based on their favorite maps, player count, and ping. They shouldn't need to go down to the community tab to do it.
You could go around making a classic 24/7 servers with 1 map repeating, even double the tickets, as many people do. But they don't stand out, aren't added to official matchmaking, and XP modifiers vary.

How is Portal's Server Browser Different?

Portal has always been lackluster and filled with XP farm slop (more on this below). Currently, while good experiences do exist in the browser, they are difficult to find. The "Experience" tab helps greatly here to filter most liked experiences, as well as using keywords like "zombies" or "24/7". With the Godot engine allows us to edit the games in ways unlike before, it seems counterintuitive to bury games under unpopulated servers. (seriously, why are servers not ordered by player count and then by ping?) - more on this in the UI section.
Currently at release, you can't even favorite servers. If you don't hit x to view the experience details before joining, you can't even get the portal code while in the match. So much for bookmarking your favorite server, guess you'll need to search for it every time. Hopefully nobody makes terrible clones of them. 

The Slop

I'm sure I don't need to explain much about how low effort 90% of the servers on portal are, but most of them are XP farming servers, usually against bots when possible. They often advertise their XP gains, but have nerfed/modified experience gains anyway. Better yet, there is no filter for xp gains. The vast quantity of slop exacerbates the problem of not being able to find good experiences, and most of these servers are empty. I would argue for their removal, but at least get them out of sight when people are looking for actual populated experiences to play on.

The UI

Now, I know a lot of people do not like the UI in this game, and I don't want to kick a dead horse.
But why do player's need to go to the second bottom row of the scroll down menu to get to portal? I thought it was advertised as a huge extension of battlefield, and yet its almost shoved to the side. Even so, a game advertised as having a server browser, the devs literally buried it, no matter how you put it.
When it comes to searching experiences vs server browser, there is actually no reason to use the server browser, it has worse filters that don't stick around after you decide to look at any experience's info.
When you enter the server browser, it gives you recommended servers, and doesn't automatically sort by player count and ping simultaneously

Solution?

The addition of an official matchmaking server browser would allow players to play on maps they enjoy through official matchmaking and gamemodes. I cannot stress the importance of OFFICIAL MATCHMAKING here. DICE and EA likely have the metrics to see that not a ton of the playerbase uses portal anyways. 
What happened to DICE official servers that had 24/7 servers with CQB map rotation and the like?
24/7 1 map? Now its just playlists, and some playlists are so niche that the server you get pushed to has 150+ ping.
People want more selection to official modes, without being pushed to portal, where experience vary heavily.
Portal experiences should be able to be favorited, or at the very least, allow players to view their "liked" experiences to join them again in the future. Similarly, more filter options should be added for people to find good experiences, or get rid of the slop.

TLDR

  • Portal's UI is difficult to navigate
  • The server browser doesn't automatically sort experiences by ping or player count
  • You CANNOT FAVORITE Portal experiences
  • You CANNOT get the portal experience code while in said server's match
  • Portal's "experiences" are mostly XP farm slop, most of which offer nerfed xp gains anyways.
  • You can't filter by XP gains, for people who do want XP farms.
  • None of portals server's are accessible via OFFICIAL MATCHMAKING
  • No OFFICIAL MATCHMAKING server browser with classic/vanilla like servers
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