Yes, EA has humped the pooch on this one. Suggestions...
- Give the players back the ability to host our own local servers and invite friends to join. You had that back in a lot of the earlier BF games.
- Separate progression for custom/verified maps and PvE maps. Remove the XP farming from being used for online play in PvE settings.
- Remove server persistence. If you do not have server capacity, why would you ever allow persistence?
- Tie the hosted server to the server owner. If the owner is not playing, take down the server. If the owner is connected but idle, lobby does not count, has to be in game, for X minutes take down the server.
- I would pay a small annual fee to be able to play whenever I want with my friends on custom/verified servers. Similar to what Fallout 76 offers. Of course, this would be last resort since you specifically said we do host our own with the Portal. We see how that is going.
Looks like by buddies and I will not be playing this weekend. Not gonna waste a lot of time just trying to get server to launch, then hoping my friends are available to play in that once in a lifetime moment.
