As you may have noticed, the servers for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 have been a little unstable lately. Thankfully though, this is because EA has been optimizing them to better deal with the higher-than-expected number of players over all platforms. The outage happened at 9:30 a.m. PST today, and all the servers should be back and improved soon (if they aren’t already).
Here are the details from the post on EA’s blog:
- X360 was severely impacted, and the service is being restarted. It should be back online and we are monitoring closely.
- PC had an outage, but the service is offline currently and the service is being restarted. It should be back online and we are monitoring closely. We will then start checking the quality of the customer experience to determine possible next steps
- PS3 appeared to have a brief outage, but has quickly recovered and the services is functioning properly at this time.
All teams are actively engaged in diagnosis and remediation. We are adding additional services to alleviate load. Despite having a major infrastructure in place, the peak traffic this weekend has been huge, 400% higher than any other Battlefield’s peak simultaneous users. The teams will continue to monitor the services closely. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and will provide further updates on the latest developments as they are relevant.
While dedicated servers are great, this really is one of the drawbacks to them. These issues are common during launch weeks, especially since it is hard for a company to judge just how many servers they need to make sure everyone can play without problems.
Any of you been experiencing problems playing? Or did you just decide to play something else while everything is sorted out? Also, if you need any reading material during the downtime, check out our review of the game.
Source: EA Battlefield Blog
Around the web:
‘Black Ops 2′ Doesn’t Need New Engine, Says Treyarch 
MW2 Map Terminal Shows Up In ‘Modern Warfare 3′ Patch Files 
‘Halo 4′ Box Art Revealed 
Sony Shares Plummet To 32-Year Low 
Loading ...
There are no excuses for such widespread and hard-impacting outages. EA has had more than enough time to ensure that the server capability is suited for the number of shipped / reserved game copies. This casts a bad light on an already dim competition for Modern Warfare 2; the online experience fails to shine in the only ways that could have exceeded the rival shooter.
EA should be thoroughly embarrassed at the total crash of an entire console's worth of players, and the pandemic issues with the game should incite some layoffs… or at least some targeted restructuring of the QA department.
There have been a few bugs (the server browser in the PC version is very slow, and punkbuster needed manual updating), but once ironed out the PC version has really beaten my expectations. I was a huge fan of BF2, and the CoD games on PC, and this game feels like Battlefield 3, but with much tighter gunplay. It's not quite as fluid as COD4 on PC, but very close.
The ground vehicles are great, and they have toned down the aerial supremacy we saw in BF2.
Definitely worth checking out if you enjoyed BF2 and the COD games.
The QA department can't judge the amount of players that are going to be playing.
EA said that peak traffic is 400% higher than it has ever been with any Battlefield game. I don't think anyone could expect that.
You cant expect a company to buy servers for 2 million people if only 500,000 people are on at one time. That would be a huge waste of money.
It's simple economics, and the issues should be resolved soon.
Well, the QA department should know how many people -could- play. A simple stress-test of the servers should have told EA how much strain they could handle, and at what factor of safety they should be operated.
When EA registered more pre-order copies than the stress test statistic indicated, alarm bells should have started blaring. It's a fairly simple process, and if I can explain it in three sentences, doesn't it follow that EA should have been able to cover the same ground in three weeks leading up to launch?
At least you can still play the single player while you wait for the servers to come back up! *lol jokes*