Sounds like BF1 servers may be getting worse than in BF4. It appears DICE wants to limit admin control of the servers. Based on what I’ve seen some DICE employees post in the Procon forums I’m not surprised about this at all and it makes sense based on what Xfactor reportedly said in his stream.
Also there is history in BF4 and BF3 of DICE slowing taking options away from server admins they used to be able to do. Slowly with each server patch and game patch options have been taken away from ranked servers.
Official servers are even worse. OFFICIAL servers are almost entirely supplied by private admins. You have to PAY to rent an OFFICIAL server but you can’t move, kick, or even ban any player for any reason. No matter if they are even blatantly cheating. Also you can’t even use the yell command to post server messages to people. So these servers have turned into the safe havens for cheaters, trolls, and trouble makers. The only reason any one pays to run OFFICIAL servers for DICE is because the quick match system only matches to them which makes them fill up faster. So DICE purposefully broke the quick match system so it would favor Official servers so people would be forced to rent Official servers if they wanted any chance of having full servers without a large clan helping to seed the server. This reduces DICE and EA’s cost of running servers while they get their way by admins having less control. It is a win win for them.
So get ready for locked down servers that gaming communities can’t customize much like they could in ranked servers in BF4. I hope you all like Official servers the community has to pay for but can’t change much because I fear this is the way BF1 is heading.
I could be wrong but signs are pointing this way. I hope DICE and EA clarify this soon and don’t make everyone wait for the game’s release before letting us know how servers will work in BF1.
I hate servers that tell you you can’t use shotguns or c4 or whatever… they should be unrankend so if you want to be ranked you should allow all the options and not restrict them!
I don’t think servers who make their server no explosives, or pistol only should have their server ranked. I am all for restrictions on what admins can do.
If they want those servers… boom unranked. Simple fix
Then you won’t have many servers to choose from. I doubt people will want to pay large amounts of money each month to rent a server they have no control over as ranked servers.
Simple fix is to not play on servers you don’t like. How hard is that? That way everyone can get what they want and there will be more servers to choose from.
But if you want a dead game 6 months after release then keep asking for locked down ranked servers. I doubt DICE or EA will foot the bill for all the servers they will need to run to have enough for everyone.
Edit: This is all just a guess anyway, nothing has even been announced about servers. Nobody knows, but even if they did limit it, people would buy them
if admins cant kick people who are trouble makers then i’ll save my money.
i mean really if theres a cheater in the server i would like the admin to be able to take care of it.
Pool has a point. Servers that limit any aspect of the full game shouldn’t be allowed into the ranking system. Players on those servers aren’t having to face the same situations as everyone else.
Competition Billiards (ranked) vs Pub/Bar Billiards.
How is it invalid? The first 2 games didn’t have a ranking system. You could host a server from home. They even shipped with a server manager UI that let you change the kits, factions and vehicle loadouts. Everybody had direct access to the server files. Dice changed all that with BF2 introducing the ranked server platform and then even further with 2142 and once more with BF3 … BattleLog. How is this any different?
Your history and or knowledge of BF is starting to look a bit greyed.
Just because you could do it with others doesn’t make it right or fair.
They have to something about the badmins and the boosting.
How was Visceral to blame when they launched Hardline and a bunch of no kill Hotwire servers popped up and people just drove around in circles to unlock the whole game then complain that the game had no content.
One way to deal with boosting servers is a handicap system. You double the tickets you get half the points. Maybe that is worth a try.
One of the biggest issues I see in “public” servers is the blatant racism and language, not to mention the trolling (if I can’t have that choppie I’m going to C4 it). Admins must have control to kick for that kind of activity. We have a BF4 clan server, and had auto kicks for language. If you can’t play without being immature and / or racist, then you should stick to single player games. It’s why my kids can’t play multiplayer on XBox Live, they seem to not have any control over it. I will let them play on controlled clan servers, even if they do get kicked to make room for clan members. Although you’re always going to get over-zealous admins, most of the people who complain got kicked for good reason. Plus we added “Rekt” to the autokick, made my day everytime somebody got booted.
I’m pretty sure Admins will still have the ability to kick/ban players disrupting game play. some people are just hyping and distorting the facts at hand for god knows whatever reason. If DICE removed those simple administrative abilities there would be very very few servers available to play on. Changing the system to where limiting classes/vehicles/gadgets and or higher/lower tickets are classified as unranked is fine and should not affect the vast majority of BF players. It definitely increases the legitimacy of the game and ranking platform.
For what it’s worth, I agree that specialty servers, such as pistol only, could / should be unranked. I’m not ready to jump on the hate bandwagon until proven otherwise. However, I made that mistake with Battlefront.
Limiting the gameplay to restrictive weapon use - unranked works perfectly for that. We run the procon scripts for no explosives, etc when we want to have an event (or, for example, the zombie mod). There’s no reason to restrict weapon usage to pistols or knives and maintain a benefit (like ranks, points). You can observe in BF4Stats the players who have benefited from that type of “permissive” TOS abuse (take a look at the top knife stats in BF4). I’m ambivalent toward most “house rules” for the most part - if they took that away from ranked there’d be no change in how we run servers.
However, if they restrict admins abilities to care for and provide security for their communities (immediately remove griefers & racists or assist in server balancing when desparately needed, etc), then no - server owners won’t pay for the privilege of branding a box they can’t “own”. Not to the degree they own and operate via GSPs now. It’s far too expensive for that. Building and maintaining a large community of clanmates, pubs and regulars is difficult enough without having to say “Sorry, in our nest of servers we can’t do anything about the folks dynamiting the friendly vehicles or spamming the chat for days with bigot-ous vitriol, you’ll have to deal and still give us your patronage.” That’s just not acceptable.
Badmins aren’t likely to last. Their servers either become an island unto themselves with like-minded, storm-troopery racist jackhats or die out from inactivity. It would be far better to have a blacklist option for patrons. The only problem there is the wait-lists that are generated from the good servers. And that’s not a problem, because I’ll just rent another server to add to the nest for folks to join and enjoy.
Excellent point Diety. As a clan leader, our clan works hard to run good, cleanly adminned servers. We have one sniper server and one mixed mode. I would have no issues seeing the sniper server being designated as unranked. However, as an admin, I feel having the ability to set standards for behavior (no vulgarity, racism, hacking) is a must. For example, we had one player for a while who we questioned their ability, only to find they returned with another name as their first account got banned for ping shaving. Admins should have the ability to kick these folks.
My biggest worry is that BF1 will do away with rentable, user administrated servers altogether and it become like Battlefront. The talk of “persistant squads” and the lack of any other info about servers other than they will have “dedicated servers” makes me think that is the direction they are going. If that is so, BF1 will become nothing more than a different version of CoD, and something that our clan will not invest in.
Hopefully EA/DICE will not go completely away (at least for the PC community) from having rentable servers, but the language that is dripping out of DICE/EA so far does not inspire my confidence.