So I have had this game since at least early 2015 when it was still decently populated on PC and then after graduation and getting a job, I chose to step away from the game for just a few years and adjust my attention to life, occasionally coming back once in a while.
Even after so many years it is understandable the player base would start to dwindle as they majority may choose to move over to newer titles but as of recently despite being lesser players, the amount of full servers are still decent on the global scale. Unfortunately after a few years couple with my work schedule, when I got back to playing the game all the servers in my country (Australia) are largely empty which surprised me considering it was only a year or two ago they were quite teeming with five or six full 64 player servers for different maps, rotations and game modes. Being left with no choice, I decided to go off and play on the populated OOR/International servers else where around the world (it was 12:00 Midnight in Australia where I was and it was morning on the other side of the world, notably Europe, Russia & North America. And this was my experience:
-Auto-Kicked for High ping (~200+)-
-Auto-Kicked for High ping (~200+)-
-Auto-Kicked for High ping (~200+)-
-Auto-Kicked for High ping (~200+)-
-Auto-Kicked for High ping (~200+)-
-Auto-Kicked for High ping (~200+)-
-Auto-Kicked for High ping (~200+)-
-Auto-Kicked for High ping (~200+)-
Jesus christ I can’t still believe that people still have this uninformed conservative mindset that having high ping gives you some sort of advantage, especially in a game engine as complex as Frostbite 4, this crap shouldn’t happen. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light - information travelling across vast spans of land and ocean included. A Person’s actions with the lowest ping (eg. 30) will register much earlier by the server closest to them than a person who is from the other half of the world with 250+ ping. Modern day lag compensation (as far as BF4 is concerned) are purely visual - Back in the day in older games, people with higher ping in hitscan games are forced LEAD their targets a significant distant to register a hit (Halo CE, Counter Strike 1.6). In Battlefield 4 and newer titles, you no longer have to lead to the lag compensator: If you directly aim and fire at a moving target and land a hit - it will display a hit-marker or kill but due to the high ping, only the kill (eg. the killfeed) will register that you killed a guy 0.3 seconds later compared to near instantly on low ping. The high ping player won’t have to make a monstrous lead more than he or she should like in much older games. In conclusion, people who claim that high ping (200+) gives players an advantage are equal to people who claim vaccines cause autism - in this case, they are trying to make up excuses for why they are not crap at the game. If an advantage WAS provided for playing with high ping vs against a player of low ping, you would see 95% of a multiplayer game’s population move over to play on International servers (should server browser be available) so that they would consistently get ping registering into the 200 margin, but that’s obviously not true, unless said high ping players are not given a choice on what populated servers they can choose to play in.
The servers left in BF4 which are actually populated are Call-of-Duty maps with infantry only in small maps Team Death match which has nothing to do with the full Battlefield experience I originally paid for ($40 premium tax when I first got the game back when it was extremely populated even in my country. The rest of the existing servers which are not those are located internationally with ping and region locks, making the 95% largely unplayable - I’m basically permanently banned from those servers even though I am not, in a technical standpoint that is. I tried ping masks and it only works a minority of servers - the rest use Ping Enforcer which strikes down ping masks too. And people wonder why the population of BF4 (and similar multiplayer-heavy games with ping enforcement) die so quickly. Right now, we shouldn’t have the luxury of region/ping rocks since the population is low now - to get a decently full server you would have to pool as much players from everywhere around the world to fill it up - that aint happening if you auto-kick ban 85% of them. I currently also own BF1, as well as a few other games both paid and F2P which have server browsers and auto-matchmaker which the server masters are not given the ability to ping/region lock, thank god for that. But like so many other players, I paid my full fare for this game, and I should be given every right as a consumer to access the content as advertised by the developer/publisher as far as I’m not doing anything which violated the producer’s Terms of Service (which I haven’t)
As far as BF4 is concerned since it is largely unplayable now, can I get at least a 50% refund for multiplayer? If not, here are some game update suggestions (which I doubt will happen considering DICE is done with this game 3 years ago)
- Make everyone’s ping hidden and registers as ‘-’ on every server by default and the true ping value is only available to see for each player their own - for those servers with ping enforcers, this will result in everyone including the admin themselves ironically, being auto-kicked from the server and in order for them to re-gain access they would have to remove the ping/region lock. Its either everyone-can-enter-and-play or no-one-can-play whilst also still allowing admin to retain their other moderation abilities (eg. kick out hackers, glitchers etc.)
- Make BF4 + Premium on the house for a limited time to fill up the multiplayer servers to revitalize this game.
