Supporting Communities on Portal

The Battlefield Team has announced that backfill bots need to be disabled on Verified Experiences in order to receive full progression. To quote them directly,

“We have organized a series of changes to emphasize our commitment to highlighting the player community and making this a space where you can celebrate creativity, find unique experiences, play with friends, and build communities.”

My focus today is on the friends/community aspect. 

My group of friends on average gets 3-6 people on a night, while we might get up to 12 people on during the weekends. On Battlefield 4, we used to run a rental server on PS4 that ran under the large scale battles playlist (Official Settings, 64 player Conquest). It was a beacon for my friends to hop on whenever they were free, and at one point the server had over 10,000 likes and would be populated on a nightly basis.

During Battlefield 4, if your server was set to official settings, anyone who chose regular matchmaking could be thrown into it (in addition to people seeking it out through the server browser). Official settings servers also prevented moderators from being able to kick players/team switching, essentially creating a persistent server with full experience.

Under Battlefield 6’s current system, matchmaking is disbanded after every match. For groups larger than 4, this means having to have your friends chase you into each lobby at the end of every match since they don’t fit into your squad. The workaround to this would be a Verified Experience Portal server, giving you the persistent server to stick together after every match, while retaining full experience.

The primary issue is that of server population. On Battlefield 4, it meant sitting in your server waiting for people to join (or in other cases, having to play a 2v2 conquest match until the teams started to flesh out). On Battlefield 6, backfill bots were a great way of getting the match started until more people joined the server. We were able to do this last Saturday until the server was fully populated, and it remained fully populated with players until Monday morning, gaining 70 likes in the process.

With backfill bots no longer earning progression, we will have to turn off the bots to restore full experience progression. To further compound the issue, Battlefield 6 requires 32 players to be in a lobby before starting a standard 64 player conquest match. Under the current system, it is borderline impossible to find enough people who are patient enough to wait in a lobby long enough for the match to start. 

In the effort of supporting the groups of friends and communities The Battlefield Team wishes to foster, I offer a few suggestions.

1. Making a Favorites List

Under the current system, liking a server helps to increase its visibility. However, if you enjoyed a server you played on and want to return to it currently, you have to remember the exact name of the server you were in. There is also some additional confusion with the server experience code, as entering the code will sometimes create a copy of the experience you’re looking for, rather than joining the original server.

Having a favorites list to see which servers are active will help greatly in having people return on regular basis.

2. Official Settings Tag

Some servers created by the Battlefield Team on Portal have an official settings tag. If a player is creating a 100% unmodified verified experience (outside of minor stuff like the server name or map rotation) they should be able to earn the official settings tag.

Additionally, finding a way to include servers marked with the officials setting tag in the matchmaking pool will help players in finding your server. 

3. Locking Experience Codes

As a final idea, creators should have the option of locking their creation codes. Doing so will allow players to emphasize their servers for players to pool into, rather than making numerous duplicates that eat up server capacity. This will also help prevent and players with bad intentions making a server that looks similar to the original creator’s, only to have some funky settings that ruin the gameplay experience.

These are just a few ideas I have regarding the future of Portal. With the right adjustments, I believe Portal can service friend groups and communities in the years to come. But without the right adjustments, I worry that this feature that the developers have put a lot of time into will end up languishing and underused.

If anyone has any additional ideas, feel free to add them in the comments. Let me know what you guys think.