No-one on our server

Blunt · March 25, 2010, 12:03:39 AM

I've tried to play on most evenings this week, even joining 1st and waiting for the 1 other person to turn up, and tonight with 3v3 then 2v2.

Not a lot of fun. It's hard to rush with 2 players.:sad:

I understand that there is a Punkbuster issue with some servers that prevents people joining, though I haven't seen any thing posted about it.

So c'mon folks, if you're gonna play bc2, play it on our server if you can.
start a game, post in the forum and use steam friends to invite.

Where are all the pubbies lately? why don't they come?
Is our server showing up in searches?

Somethings not quite right; with other games (CoD4, MW2 etc) the first few weeks were be really busy. so what is wrong?

TeaLeaf · March 25, 2010, 07:26:53 AM

The logs show the server is usually pretty full from early afternoon until about 17:30 when it looks like the entire server decided on an early dinner and departed. From the logs it looks like there was a 2 minute gap in server profile use, what that means I'm not precisely sure, but it probably involved most people losing connection with the server I am guessing. I suspect EA, but will dig a little at Multiplay to try to find out more.

It struggled to recover player numbers after that incident. Bottom line is we need to seed games on the server by being there and keeping our regulars happy so please do join the server when you want a game (the same always applied to our CS servers, they need to be seeded).

We already have regulars on our BC2 server, so we are seeing pubbies join us, but it's a slow process and the majority look for an almost full server first and rarely venture into low population servers. Let's hope our excellent ping pushes us into more peoples line of sight. The server defintely appears to be showing up though in the browser.

TeaLeaf · March 25, 2010, 07:39:30 AM

This was what killed the server population:

Quote from: MultiplayerBattlefield Bad Company 2 - Updated to R8
Mar 24 2010 17:26:24 by Killing
All Bad Company 2 servers have been updated to version R8 this build includes a number of crash fixes, so we hope all servers will be more stable now.
The full change list is:-

*
* Workaround for the "player manages to join server twice" crash. Now the server detects this and refuses the player entry. Client might hang but it will not take down the server as well.
* Workaround for the "cannot join player to any team" crash. Teams might get uneven, most notably SQDM sessions with 5v3 players, but the server should no longer crash.
* Game sends PB output to pbucon (so pb webtool can be used to run PB commands and see their results)

We lost the server for about 2 minutes at 17:21-17:23 and the population dropped from full to just a couple of people and never recovered during the evening.

Tutonic · March 25, 2010, 08:28:11 AM

Hopefully that update will improve out stability.

The server crashes we've been seeing have really killed the server population recently (once it's empty it takes quite an effort to get it going again).

Blunt · March 25, 2010, 11:15:37 AM

Thanks for the info

no peanuts · March 25, 2010, 12:13:03 PM

Tried joining a couple of times last night, but ended up getting called by work :crying:

Hoping for a more peaceful evening tonight, so I can get a couple of rounds in! :boxing: :yahoo:

Penfold · March 25, 2010, 12:23:35 PM

I'll be on tonight and I want a few hours of solid gameplay to get up the ranks a bit.

acidrainy · March 25, 2010, 01:05:44 PM

It has been barren of late :/

I wouldn't know about server promotion but a couple other, lesser, servers seem to be fully populated more often than the dMw one.

Perhaps a rename to the server with tags such as [uk], [teamwork], [free syrup waffles] may jolt a few more connections?

Like I said, I'm no expert!

[BIG]magnus · March 25, 2010, 01:14:27 PM

Quote from: acidrainy;306854It has been barren of late :/

I wouldn't know about server promotion but a couple other, lesser, servers seem to be fully populated more often than the dMw one.

Perhaps a rename to the server with tags such as [uk], [teamwork], [free syrup waffles] may jolt a few more connections?

Like I said, I'm no expert!

I like the waffles!! The UK tags and Team work is an idea that may well work. I am still not sure how many people are joining servers through the browser. The big problem seems to be the join now is not filling the server at the moment. It is certainly worth putting UK and Team play as part if server name. The .co.uk part of the name should give it away but....

TeaLeaf · March 26, 2010, 07:22:17 AM

Seems last night was pretty decent, we had a server population from before 18:00 through to about 24:00 and most of the time it was full or close to full. As you may have noticed the rename was done yesterday lunchtime to include the suggested keywords.

Tutonic · March 26, 2010, 08:03:11 AM

Also, it didn't crash

[BIG]magnus · March 26, 2010, 10:12:31 AM

Indeed was a good night last night. I did crash to desktop 5 times but at least the server worked and was full! :yahoo: We can take another look at game mode rotation when ghost is back.

Blunt · March 26, 2010, 10:37:34 AM

Well, That was more like it:D
some great battles with a full server.
Lets hope that it continues
:dmw:

valdeko · March 26, 2010, 11:20:35 AM

Indeed, very nice battles last night, hopefully it will be like it every night (meh, one can hope).

kregoron · March 26, 2010, 12:04:30 PM

We are not the only one to experience this sudden drop..
It would seem that they change the way the game prioritize, when people use the Play now function.. it used to be completely random which server you ended up on.. but now it seems they changed it so it sends people towards servers with atleast 10 people on it..
Once you get above that most servers i play on gets full within the next 30 mins

i also tested it a bit last night, joined about 30 servers and 80% i got on, had aprox 10-14 people on