Ideas
I absolutely agree with this statement. It seems that normal official servers are laden with people who are attempting to 'cheat' with that **bleep** Arctic cheat that is found online. I am not one of them and am very frustrated when I HAVE to jump into a server where they reside. I can barely get a kill off because their cheat software/hardware finds me and fires up before I can get a shot off. This isn't cause I am slow or have slow internet. I have gigabit ethernet and I am no slouch. But, even when i am the first to fire, they still get the kill after only 3 hits while mine take 5 or more. Is this because they have utilized the 'farming' method and unlocked EVERYTHING before I could. I work, a lot, and I don't have a lot of time to sit down and enjoy a game I spent $80 on because every time I try to get some XP, it is nerfed immediately when I enter the game. I used to play Battlefield 2 and Spec-Ops back in the day, we had a running world team called [DRS] and actually placed 1st in the world, for one week. An accomplishment I cherish to this day, because of PunkBuster which removed cheaters. Now they are prominent everywhere, so I try to make a weapon XP server for me an a few close friends, but now that is Nerfed from BF 6 because of lobbyists, or CoD players. Streamers have all day to play and get their weapons and stuff unlocked, some of us don't and is rather unfair.
I would say take a page from your greatest failures in Battlefield, I am talking about Battlefield 2042, and allow, first off, Bot servers that still allow full XP for weapons, camos, vehicles, etc. so long as they fall within a particular set of guidelines (as described by Studdmuffins above). We should also be able to choose whether to have co-op bot servers or whatever, as was intended originally by Battlefield, but that is now lost. Don't punish those that try to still play the game legally, even if it is a bot server, because we know they dont' have wall hacks, or aimbots...(thats funny, cause they do, lol). We are still playing the game, and when EA decides to fix the cheat issue a lot better, then we might come back and play with actual people. How we decide to play that game that was originally meant is up to us...
The real issue was that people were making more XP farms than you (EA/DICE) could handle. That's on you for telling everyone that they could have a server of their own to run as they please; which by the way must pass a Verification process, and if it does...then allow them to have full XP progression. The problem was not being able to control ALL of the zero (0) filled servers and that took up too much space. What you should have done is, if someone copies an original server, it is immediately taken down after no one is in the match. The original is still viable for perpetual server mode. Only copies are immediately taken down after the last person leaves, and then, if someone tries to leave an individual in the game to keep it from shutting down, an algorithm can be made to see if the person is just there or actually playing, and if not, shut it down after 2 hours or so (just to make sure people still want to join).
Fix this, please. I know you already have our money in this, but make it for the masses and try to come up with better solutions than just taking away what people feel is comfortable for them. Thank you.