The new Origin/Battle Field 4 U/I and our server.

[Red_Dawn_FTG1]

Good afternoon Everyone.

Simpson, RedKilla, and I wanted to send you an update on the new Origin U/I and our thoughts on it as well as how this will impact our server.

First off, we are not that keen on the new U/I (I am being nice here and not using the words Simpson used!) We see many issues with this U/I and believe it WILL impact us and our server in a negative way if we are not pro-active in responding. First off, some of the issues we see with the new U/I:

1. Appears to me no support for Platoons
2. Everyone lost their server 'favorites' lists
3. the player stats reporting have been seriously cut back
4. there are issues with the installing the DLCs for some players.
5. No way to manage your players loadout outside the game
6. When you select a player to "join on friend' you can not see what server they are on. no details at all.....

While we are very concerned about the lack of support for Platoons, our biggest concern is losing the favorites. As many of you know, we just spent the last 2 weeks building our user base by applying tweaks and playing in "Official" mode. The WHOLE PURPOSE of this was to get these new players to 'favorite' our server so they would come back. And it worked as during that time, we added somewhere around 5,000 new players to our server. if just 10% favorited us, that is huge impact on our ability to keep our server populated. All that work is gone.

Cue Simpson screaming and pulling his hair out (hee hee.... Simpson is a girl!)


So, how are we going to respond?

well the three of us made a decision that we need to rebuild the favorites list and get players back.

So the bad news: we are going to keep the server in "Official" mode for a little bit longer than we wanted to. This means we will have the longer vehicle spawn delay and only 800 ticket games.

But the good news: Simpson has figured out a way to deny access of suspected cheaters to our server! if you recall, in official mode, we can not admin users with admin kills and bans through the ProCon interface. However, we have manually created a list of users that will be denied access! So if you see someone that clearly needs banned, get us his/her information and we add them to the ban list. we will need your help maintaining this list.

There is one other plus side to this... With the new U/I, they implemented the feature from BF1 where you can let the interface "Quick Match". This feature searches for a server for you based on Skill Level, Location, Ping, and a few other factors. this feature is expected to be used a lot and pushes players to "Official" servers first. We should see a shit ton of action!

So what does all this mean?
Well the new U/I rolled out this morning and we immediately put the server in "Official" mode. Since this morning, we have already added approximately over 700 new players!

In addition, our server is KILLING it over the RANKED server that have not figured this out yet..... notice below:


So please bear with us as we work through this disaster from Origin. And thanks to hard work from Simpson & Redkilla, we are making the best of this shit stain as possible!

KEEP KILLING THE RED GUYS BROTHERS!

Danno

 

[jsimpson32]

Please be noted I will try to be vigilant creating a ban list but there are going to be a lot of hacker guys that get through.

 

[Red_Dawn_FTG1]

So we have our first 24 hours of the new Origin/BF4 U/I and our managed Official server settings (with a new map rotation...)

so how did we do? Well as reported by Simpson:

1. we added over 1000 new players to our server in one day...
2. we had our first ever 24 hour constant play. The server never emptied
3. our new anti-hacker process worked perfectly!

So now we need your help. The only way to keep hackers at bay is for you to help us collect the names of the hackers so we can add them to our list. Please be as precise as possible when collecting a name as the name on our list must be a precise match to the name in the game. Hackers are good at making this difficult. for Instance, we have seen:

complex number names: 1100110110000101001010
masking letters: hacker_man_i1234 (where the 1 is a lower case L - or a Bar | in the Battlelog font, they look alike)
or just silly names: JSimpson32

thanks,

danno

 

[RedKilla]

Don't forget...fuck Dice!!!

 

[jsimpson32]

 

[Undertaker]

Some amazing progress! Whenever I'm on the server I'll be sure to record any suspicious activity.

 

[Undertaker]

On a side note I still use battlelog. I find that the new UI takes a while to load and isn't as useful.

The good news is that anyone who still runs the game through battlelog keeps all their favorites and advantages battlelog had over the new UI

 

[Snoman_113]

Can we keep this discussion going? The way I understand it, the reason for running the server in official mode was to attract more players with the assumption that a certain percentage would 'favorite' our server and come back, thereby keeping the server populated at a higher rate into the future. It seems as though it has been working very well and I am enjoying the fruits of your labor by having a full server most of the time. That's awesome. However, I have to be honest when I say I'm not a big fan of the long vehicle respawn time and the current map rotation in "Official Mode". At what point will we go back to the way it was before Dice bent us over and shoved it in without lubrication? What can I do to help?

 

[40ozpimpin]

One thing you can do is send me recruiting prospects. The more members we have that are active the more likely our server will be full when we switch back to "Ranked". During the week we run official to keep it full and try to get people to favorite our server, on the weekends we usually run it on "Ranked". So if you want to help, if you are playing and see someone playing who is using their mic and seems like a team player and respectful message me his name.

 

[Undertaker]

I believe Simpson can run the server on any map he wants while in official mode. There doesn't even have to be a rotation (as far as I know)

BUT, we did have a collective vote on which maps will be on rotation a few weeks ago on our Facebook page.

Perhaps in a few weeks we can hold another vote for a new map list to change things up and give any new members an opportunity to vote.