Battlefield 3 No EA Servers?

[Belated]

What the heck is going on? I just heard from a friend today that EA shut down their Battlefield 3 servers. I went on Xbox Live, and sure enough there were no EA-hosted servers on there! Tell me this is only a temporary thing. What gives them the right to pull out so early when we paid full price for this game? (When I say "right", I'm talking about a moral one, not a legal one. So don't get all "they can do what they want" on me.)

They have servers you can "rent" for a fee. So let me get this straight. In less than a year, EA pulls their servers and then asks us for more money if we want to keep playing online?

Just more proof why we need to have tight, extremely-specific regulation laws in every aspect of big business. And those laws need to be written by consumer advocates.

Or am I getting ahead of myself and raging for nothing?

EDIT: It seems some DICE servers are still up, but not as many. And some of them are unofficial servers that just say "DICE" in the title to confuse us.

 

[Vault101]

that cant be right

not when they jsut realsed a big old patch a while ago...and dont forget all that nice gear peopel can pay for..rather than "play" for, why give up that cash?

 

[Belated]

that cant be right

not when they jsut realsed a big old patch a while ago...and dont forget all that nice gear peopel can pay for..rather than "play" for, why give up that cash?

There are still people-hosted servers. Lots of servers paid for by players.

And I may be getting ahead of myself a tiny bit. There appears to still be DICE servers kicking around. But not as many.

Captcha: Toyota Prius c
Toyota: Moving Forward... even when you take your foot off the gas and apply the brakes.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Seems rather early but you people need to know EA shuts down servers after a year, has been doing it for ages even if the game breaks with it they just don't give a shit.
Probably not the real deal yet, I don't think they would be that stupid now that new DLC is at the door...

 

[Vault101]

Seems rather early but you people need to know EA shuts down servers after a year, has been doing it for ages even if the game breaks with it they just don't give a shit.
Probably not the real deal yet, I don't think they would be that stupid now that new DLC is at the door...

a year?

what kind of bullshit is that? they push for multiplayer in games like Dead space 2 and Mass effect 3 and then just shut it down in a year?

but why battlefeild 3? that was one of the biggest games to come put, they wanted it to compete with COD....why shut it down after a year? thats the stupid "hype untill release day!" thing and then throw it on the scrap heap

and they say used games are their problem /rant

what games have they dont this with?

 

[Freechoice]

It hasn't been a year yet either.

 

[BiggyShackleton]

They dropped a lot of the official servers to make space for people who wanted to rent their own. I assume that if the level of players renting servers was to drop then more official would re-appear. They haven't actually shut anything down.

At the moment it's just to appease the players who either want to exclusively play a certain map/game type with custom rules or be a complete fuckhead with their admin rights.

Seems rather early but you people need to know EA shuts down servers after a year, has been doing it for ages even if the game breaks with it they just don't give a shit.
Probably not the real deal yet, I don't think they would be that stupid now that new DLC is at the door...

That's bullshit. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was released in April 2006, and its servers were shut down in August 2011. EA don't seem to have a set pattern, it's based entirely on activity. (Aside from sports titles which may or may not have a yearly long pattern).

 

[distortedreality]

The game uses dedicated servers though right?

If so, this shouldn't be an issue.

 

[MrTwo]

The BF3 patch really pissed me off.

Seriously, I regard it as players essentially "stealing" the DICE hosted servers, because the more rented servers there are, the less official ones there will be.

This would be fine, except I just want to play a normal fucking game of battlefield. Not a 600% tickets or "air maps only" server. Just normal. I want the game to end, for god's sake.

Its getting harder and harder to find normal servers now, because I have to wade through all these shitty custom servers.

If you want your own server, that's fine, it doesn't mean I have to see it, though. If they just added a filter that allowed only official servers, it would be fine (and thank god they added Conquest Assault as a separate gamemode, man that mode is shit).

Lots of the other things they did with the patch were great, but something doesn't feel right. I dunno, it just doesn't feel as fun playing Battlefield anymore.

Man that was a long rant...

In short, there are less official servers to make room for the rented ones.

 

[LiquidSolstice]

Seems rather early but you people need to know EA shuts down servers after a year, has been doing it for ages even if the game breaks with it they just don't give a shit.
Probably not the real deal yet, I don't think they would be that stupid now that new DLC is at the door...

a year?

what kind of bullshit is that? they push for multiplayer in games like Dead space 2 and Mass effect 3 and then just shut it down in a year?

but why battlefeild 3? that was one of the biggest games to come put, they wanted it to compete with COD....why shut it down after a year? thats the stupid "hype untill release day!" thing and then throw it on the scrap heap

and they say used games are their problem /rant

what games have they dont this with?

Calm the fuck down. The BF3 EA official servers are not gone, I literally just played one, jesus, keep it in your pants.

 

[Vault101]

Calm the fuck down. The BF3 EA official servers are not gone, I literally just played one, jesus, keep it in your pants.

its not just about battlefeild 3 (I grew bored of that very quickly)

its just axing games after a year, period.....I mean pushing multiplayer where its not needed and then not standing by your product is bullshit

 

[Smooth Operator]

what games have they dont this with?

Sports games are their usual petri dish for developing these sneaky practices, and any game that didn't live up to expectations.

And when the EA CEO went "herp derp we could sell ammo in games" he wasn't just talking out of his ass all that shit is going on in sports titles, subscriptions, buying power, one time consumables, multiplayer shut downs,...
With everything else they will just implement it slowly so noone gets up in arms.

Word of final warning Origin also only has a 1 year legal limit for your downloadable stuff, beyond that they can remove games without repercussion.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I called it!

Now let me find that post...

Just wait until EA starts to fool about with the default server list they have currently running (leaving popular maps out of rotation, spamming one map into 90% of their servers loadorders, etc.) to make people have to resort to paying for their own server to actually get decent map rotations. They did it with Battlefield play4free, I wouldn't put it past them to try it here as well.

Well, at least evil is predictable.

 

[redisforever]

Yeah, I get that too. I really liked the standard servers, and I don't really like the fact that all of the servers now have a bunch of changes. I wish there was an option to use EA/DICE servers, rented ones, or both.

 

[Mouse_Crouse]

EDIT: It seems some DICE servers are still up, but not as many. And some of them are unofficial servers that just say "DICE" in the title to confuse us.

It's clunky for now, but honestly not hard at all. Search "DICE", find a mostly full server, click on it and check the box listed the owners gamertag. Unlike the server name you CANNOT change it on a rented server, if it says DICE, you are good. If it has a gamertag, you know it's rented trying to trick you.

 

[wooty]

They've allowed people to start reting servers, so the titles are ow filled with crap and rule changes.

Plus, since they let this happen I've experienced nothing but massive lag while playing BF3 now, was all fine up until a month ago.

 

[distortedreality]

Yea I call bullshit. EA is not dumb enough to do something like that since they are not legally allowed to. They may pull some crazy shit that certain gamers dont like but EA does not go around doing obviously illegal crap like that.

What exactly would be illegal about it?

They're not shutting the game down, they're not impeding/stopping online play, they're doing nothing wrong at all. If the multiplayer component relied on the EA game servers to function then there would be an issue - but that's not the case here.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

ITT: Console gamers learn about dedicated servers. It's rare for a game that uses dedicated servers to have official ones at all, except maybe for tournaments or the first few months after launch. After that, the whole thing is self sustaining, and can literally last for decades. Although with BF3, they took out the option for people to host their own server[edit]without paying EA to rent it, I mean[/edit], so it won't have quite the longevity that, say, Unreal Tournament, Quake, or heck, Battlefield 1942 had and still have.

 

[distortedreality]

Yea I call bullshit. EA is not dumb enough to do something like that since they are not legally allowed to. They may pull some crazy shit that certain gamers dont like but EA does not go around doing obviously illegal crap like that.

What exactly would be illegal about it?

They're not shutting the game down, they're not impeding/stopping online play, they're doing nothing wrong at all. If the multiplayer component relied on the EA game servers to function then there would be an issue - but that's not the case here.

They legally have to support online play for a minimum of one year. That means providing servers for people to play on.

Um no they don't, and no it doesn't.

If anything, they have to provide the ability to play online, which is what they do with their battle login thingamabob (can't remember what they call it). They have no legal obligation to provide physical game servers at all.

Learn to dedicated server dude. As stated, if it was a P2P thing and they were shutting down the servers that handled the matchmaking, then there would be reason to blow up. As it is, the more control the community has over the servers, the better IMO.

 

[distortedreality]

Um no they don't, and no it doesn't.

If anything, they have to provide the ability to play online, which is what they do with their battle login thingamabob (can't remember what they call it). They have no legal obligation to provide physical game servers at all.

Your right they dont have to actually legally do it but if they dont they get fined a metric fuckton. So yes they have to provide online service for a minimum of one year.

Which is exactly what they're doing, shutting down game servers doesn't change that.