No, the official DICE servers for Battlefield 3 aren't mysteriously disappearing. Don't get a hernia or something.
There have been rumors floating around the those official online servers were going away, leaving only the privately rented servers available. But according to what EA told GameSpot , this really isn't the case.
"DICE is not shutting down servers. If DICE-managed servers appear unavailable, it is because they have been rented and customized by players. DICE will continue to add servers and will reserve a percentage of servers for players who prefer to connect through DICE-hosted servers."
If you weren't aware, DICE lets you rent BF3 servers for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at the cost of $25/month. If you do this, you can create exactly the multiplayer experience you want, which means you can decide on the maps and game modes, and also gives you the power to kick out the instigators (or anyone you want, really). Obviously, there are plenty of people who take advantage of this, because DICE needs to add more servers. Hopefully, this will happen soon.
So it's not that they've disappeared, necessarily; they've just been rented. Some don't really like this idea, by the way, as some who host servers can act…well, downright childish at times.
Related Game(s): Battlefield 3
Wow everybody involved got to say "DICE" a lot.
Okay we've got 2 haters, anyone else wanna join in?
I hate it when people randomly down vote comments!
Ah!
Not a hater, I've played plenty of BF3, but when EA tell us we've been paying for their servers (and pretty bloody expensive rates at that!), then I do get a little cranky.
When I started playing BF3 for the PC, there were quite a few servers up, but once they started to restrict what you could do with them, I found that a lot of people renting servers dropped them.
I havent played it in months, they keep nerfing everything and screwing around with weapon/vehicle damage and attachments, and it's really not much fun when they keep going back and forth, I'd rather just go back to playing Counter-Strike.
I don't buy games to play online published by EA, too many times they shut down servers, sure popular ones like Battlefield 3 probably wont be shut down till well after the next battlefield is out, but I bet other servers like say COD servers will be up atleast twice as long
and then that "Pass" thing, the few games I've bought with a pass have been a pain in the — and I definetly will be buying games without the pass as long as they still exist
This whole rented server thing is a terrible idea. It sounded nice at first as you got to customize your game but in practice it just allows those who rent the servers to play god. I've been kicked several times for no reason other than I was the admin's nemesis…it's actually quite frustrating when you're having a good game and then you get kicked for doing just that. Get rid of rented servers, it makes the game worse.
This is just appalling – on KZ2, SOCOM, you-name it, the price of the game included the price of the server to play on it. With the rent-a-server program, it now turns out you weren't paying for anything new at all – you were, in fact, giving EA money for the servers they were providing before. This is particularly the case for a game like BF3, where the server options are limited to say the least. Compare this with something like Starhawk or Warhawk, which gave you better custom server options for free, at launch, and it confuses me somewhat why people get all excited over the BF franchise. It's solid, but if I didn't have so many mates playing it, it would have had 10-15 hours of my time and I'd've left it in the dust for SOCOM:SF. As it is, with Starhawk's release, I'll be on BF3 for clan wars, a little warming up, and that's it.
What they basically said in that quote is "no, the servers aren't unavailable, because we are making them unavailable by renting them!". Makes so much sense.
The problem here isn't that we have no servers to play. The problem is that the official servers (official as in "official rules") are gone. A Conquest server with 1000 tickets in Operation Métro is not what we would call official. Finding servers with the normal settings has become a chore.