DICE shuts down Battlefield: Bad Company 2 game server provider

DICE have clarified a report posted yesterday that they have asked all game server providers to shut down idle Battlefield: Bad Company 2 servers in an attempt to lower the traffic on EA servers that caused quite a stir in the Battlefield community.

DICE have clarified a report posted yesterday that they have asked all game server providers to shut down idle Battlefield: Bad Company 2 servers in an attempt to lower the traffic on EA servers that caused quite a stir in the Battlefield community. According to the games blog:

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.

EA also offered a temporary solution for those who have servers at Multiplay who wants to opt out from a server being shut down during times of inactivity, you can do so through your account at ClanForge.

1. Goto ClanForge -> Servers, select your server and Click Edit
2. Once in the edit screen configure your servers “Auto Restart Interval” to something other than None e.g. 1 Week
3. Save your server settings

If you chose to opt in to allow your server to be shut down during times of inactivity you can start your server again at any time and as often as you like.

Other server hosts may offer a similar option on their servers. Please contact your server provider directly to see if they have any plans and if so how you can opt in or out.

This temporary solution will help reduce the server load until we can release a client fix to help reduce server browser load while keeping enough game server slots running for everyone to be able to get in game. Once our client update is complete, Multiplay will not use the idle server shut down setting and we will start up all of the EA Public servers again.

Via [Battlefield Blog]