I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly that I’d join a game in a progress, as other people come and go from a game in progress, and I wondered what the point of the match was if the teams weren’t even the same at the end of the match as when they began. Most people’s default when running a server was to turn player numbers to max and, in Battlefield’s case, “tickets” needed to win as well, but just because the numbers are bigger doesn’t mean that it’s better pacing for a match, for instance. Matchmaking sets the defaults and ensures a pretty consistent experience from start to finish of each match.
This comment from the developer is true, too.
“Matchmaking servers spin up in seconds (get filled with players), and spin down after the game is over,” Sirland wrote in a thread on X last week. "That couple of seconds when servers lose a lot of players mid-game is the only time you can join, which makes it a tricky combination (and full of queuing to join issues).
My preference for the matchmaking experience is reflected across the audience they cater to, and it contributed to an industry focus on matchmaking and the end of server browsers.
But we still need real server browsers.
If we bought a game, we should be able to do what we want with it, including running those max player/max ticket servers that run 24/7 on one map. We should be able to do it without DICE/EA’s permission, on our own if we so choose, without salaried staff running master server operations, because one day the revenue this game brings in will not justify the costs to keep it going. We should be able to deal with cheaters by vote kicking them from the server rather than installing increasingly invasive mandatory anti cheat solutions that don’t even fully solve the problem anyway, because it’s unsolvable.
The ideas are bound together. Same with anti cheat. Same with preservation. Removing private servers caused all of these problems at the same time. The author of the article speaks for the group who want the community that I admitted never mattered to me, that Portal doesn’t provide, but other knock-on effects of the death of the server browser do matter to me.
There is a server browser. There are no servers hosted on private machines. I would like fully private servers too but there is still a server browser regardless.
You are conflating two different things.
They have explained what they are complaining about several times now, so get off your pedantic horse and either join the conversation that is happening or fuck off.
It bothers me because 90% of the people in the conversation think there will be only matchmaking and nothing else because of how OP framed it.
You want to talk about how you can’t have your own private server completely disconnected for EA, fine. But that doesn’t mean the game has no browser, jfc.
No, you seem to be the only one confused here. They said a REAL browser, not just a list of servers.
Does that sound like OP was whining about simply not having a list of servers? Improve your reading comprehension before you whine about how something was stated.
You can do this because the game let’s you host a server (your rules or official ones) and includes a server browser so random people can find it and join your game.
You can’t do this because although there is a server browser, you can’t run private servers disconnected from eas infrastructure.
I am correcting OP because most of what he said in his post and what people are repeating in the comments implies that there is only matchmaking and implies that the first part isn’t possible.
Or, hear me out, people are whining about their own experiences, complaining in general about how they hate matchmaking only games. Several people even specifically mention other games before they go on to complain.
This is mostly basic commiserating that you seem to be mistaking for misunderstanding.