Multiplay has come a long way in a short time in the UK and EU markets as one of the largest private and public server providers, it is impossible to refresh the BC2 server list and not see a multiplay server at the moment, and almost to cement this DICE contacted multiplay and asked them to “shut down” all inactive private servers to help reduce overall load:
This was not asked of all GSP’s but only to one of our closest GSP’s, Multiplay.co.uk. We approached them with the idea of shutting down servers that have had no players in the server for 8 hours with the option of opting in or out for the server owners.
We did not make this decision lightly but as an attempt to temporarily lower traffic on EA servers that is caused by the game server browser while we work on a client fix for the browser here at DICE. After previously shutting down all EA Public servers which accounted for approximately 40,000 player slots we have actually gained approximately 50,000 more player slots from new rental servers. We currently have enough server capacity to allow over 150,000 players to get in a game server at once and that is just on PC.
All of this comes after EA announced hardware upgrades to master servers this weekend which saw over 11 hours downtime and clearly was not enough.
If you own a Multiplay server you are able to “opt out” of the 8 hour inactive shut down but it is on by default, this seems like a bit of an extreme measure to use on servers which players are spending hard earned cash to bring online when really DICE and EA should be increasing hardware on their end to allow the login and stat servers to handle the amount of traffic the community are producing.. its not like the game was free, the community shouldn’t need to cover EA’s hardware costs in server rental fee’s on top of already buying the game.
Let us know what you think.
