thank you for that explanation. I thought something must of changed with the servers... when its just diehard servers going i'll play again... I miss bf... and the old community. but times change what can you do... anyway gtx980 ti is out now...
What do you mean diehard servers?
There are well populated ones, even the more well known ones. The problem is that the servers will eventually become unbalanced through people leaving and joining to the point that one side will dominate the other. The problem lies is the fact that different maps can change a player from being mediocre to being really good, or any other combination.
The removal of being allowed to change the capacity of your server on the fly without a restart (the way it was since launch and the way BF3 still is), is that the quick join function will only start sending players to servers when the server is (I think) 8-10 players from capacity. I forgot to mention that this only applies to Official servers and not to Ranked servers because Official servers are the only ones that get quick join traffic.
If you do get your own server, I will tell you that there is a portion of the community that likes to play Conquest Large maps but have a server capacity of ~48 players. Also only running the Second Assault maps (without Metro) was a good guarantee to get a full server. I would set the ticket count to 1000-1200. It seemed to strike a good balance of a longer game without killing the draw of the server. When I used that setup (1200 Ticket Second Assault without Metro), for about a month the server would almost fill itself everyday.
Owning your own server can be really time consuming, but it can be fun if you're like me and like knowing why people do stuff. Like why do you come to this server? Is there any thing you like/dislike? Just questions like those. For some reason, when you do it as an admin, you get a lot more responses then you do if you were just another player in the server.
(Just a side note below)
When I had my own server, I tried to use a plugin that would balance the server based on player skill. I spent 2 months trying to tweak this to get the best results I could. I set it up so friends/clan mates would stay together given they were in the same squad as that was the one consistent complaint players would have in my server. This was extremely difficult to do and the only way I found to get close to actually balancing (based on skill) was using the player score and use the lower players on the bottom 50% (usually the ones that just joined) to unstack the server. The problem is that once you start allowing for friends to stay on the same team, it breaks the balancer's ability to do that it needs to do. I also tried to use the previous round to scramble the server for the next map, but the results would (almost without exception) make it a one sided beat down.
While some prefer a balanced (as in skill) server, most of the community would rather just play with friends as long as they're not pinned in their base. This is why I insist that an unstacking feature for Battlefield is never going to happen because DICE would have to prioritize having the server balanced (by team skill). This in turn would mean friends can't always play together. There's an overwhelming large majority of the BF community that would rather play with friends than have a two equally balanced teams.
mxphenom
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