BF4 Servers are consistently crashing - please fix this!
Hello: I'm a clan server admin having significant issues with a rented game server that crashes consistently. The provider is NFO and they say a patch is needed from EA to fix this issue. The NFO forums are full of server admins like me frustrated that we can't keep our servers up or our players happy right now. I've been an NFO customer for more than 5 years and they run great servers so I trust them when the say this is an EA issue!
I've been noticing that our server crashes more often starting late at night and this is also evident on our server use graph. We had about a 6 hour run from 3pm PST to about 9pm PST on 10/31 after the server patch and then the server started crashing every other map. So we would have about one hour of up time and then go down. It also pretty much is always crashing when the server slots are full at 64 players.
Looking at my server graph this has been the pattern now for the past two days with better up time during the day and then hourly crashes from 8:30pm on into midnight. We did not have this issue on launch day when PB and Fairfight were inactive. I've had some players tell me there are servers they play on that don't crash at all but I don't know if that's true or not. Other players are telling me all servers they have been on are crashing. Reminds me of the BF3 and BC2 releases.
Meantime, there are BF4 maps with significant sound issues where sound is clipping in and out and others were when some of the Levolution kicks in it lags the server heavily or crashes the server. Here's my list of maps with significant issues.
MP_Damage -- sound clipping in and out
MP_Journey -- sound clipping in and out
MP_Resort -- lags the server heavily when the hotel starts coming down
MP_Siege -- when the skyscraper comes down, half the server gets disconnected -- this was the beta map and that never happened during the beta. I have removed MP_Siege from our rotation for now.
The real issue here is crashes, sound issues, server Q issues and other game issues really hurt the gaming community we are trying to build as most players are blaming this on the server being crappy (which we know NFO runs very good servers) and they then decided they won't play on our server anymore and start avoiding our server to play somewhere else. Building a community of gamers is hard enough these days, and having server crashes and all the other issues noted just ruins a clans reputation. Again most players don't understand it's a PB issue or an EA/DICE server code issue. Gamers just want to play the game and rank up and they expect servers to run without hiccups. I don't know if EA understands this.
My request -- EA needs to put out a message to the entire BF community and own up to this issue of server crashes being theirs and not the fault of the gaming community or the RSP's running servers. I've been running gaming servers for my clan for 7 years now so I do have an understanding of the community and it's expectations. EA please help us out, we love Battlefield we spend signficant money on the game and on renting servers so gamers can play the game and we can help build the community. I know you have a lot going on with a new release but servers crashing don't help make the game experience any better no matter how good the game is -- and BF4 is amazing. We need our servers to stay up and keep running so players can play the game, have fun and want to buy Premium for BF4 to keep gaming with us!
Thank you for reading and for your attention to this matter.
