Finalized “prediction” … Just my opinion based on what we know and don’t know and things EA is doing with other franchises.
Server Hosting
If we are looking at MS Azure, Amazon EC2 as the host (rumored) you only need to take a peek at TitanFall 2’s server setup. TFall2 from what I can tell won’t have rentals, but the setup is nonetheless brilliant. A cloud based structure yields very little overhead, has rapid deployment and the update process (patching) will be superiorly faster. Need to adjust resources for the latest patch? Click, blink, reboot … Done! Performance and stability shouldn’t be an issue. The Beta proved that.
Another bonus to the cloud setup is if EA is going to play GSP, most of the system can be automated. Order a server, payment clears .. boom server is up and running. Here’s your login info, it’s attached to your guid. Now go twiddle the settings. No waiting on a GSP to do anything.
I’m an old school bare metal box guy. But, if they can offer the same or better performance this way with rapid deployment…I’m sold. At least on the tech.
Administration UI
Absolutely Unknown. Could be server browser based (built in like I noted in an earlier post), or web based. Personally I think it’s going to be built into the server browser. I’m also pretty confident in a companion proprietary rcon utility (EA Exclusive) being available. Phogue was hired for a reason! The Battlefield Companion mobile app may potentially have some admin abilities built in as well.
Admin Perms/Abilities
I wholeheartedly expect to see Kick/Ban, Vote Map, Mix mode rotations, limits/customizations as spec’d pg 4 (more than likely more), custom messages, Whitelist … so on and so forth. I do not expect to see 3rd party plugins. Would be nice, but it’s not needed.
The big hit I see “potentially” coming is that certain custom settings ( mainly limits ) will force servers to an unranked status.
This is just my opinion … hopes. My wishful thinking and analysis doesn’t change what we do or don’t know.
~ optimistic post