Editorial: The broken, sputtering launch of Battlefield 3 online multiplayer
Let's play a little game, folks. Here are three separate quotes from EA/DICE, each given soon after the launch of a major Battlefield. Can you tell which is for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which is for Battlefield 1943, and which is for Battlefield 3? No Googling!
"Despite having a major infrastructure in place, the peak traffic ... 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."1
"In terms of the network services, we have had unprecedented and historic peaks in terms of the activity that we're getting from the Battlefield community and players, and it's caused parts of our networks to experience some outages."2
"We have full support of EA to add as many servers as takes and then some so that everyone can play. This work has already started and servers will be added around the clock with teams working to cover this 24 hours a day so not a moment is wasted. You will be able to play this game and play it lag free!"3 If you weren't able to distinguish them from one another, I forgive you -- they all sound remarkably alike, don't they? That's because, for three Battlefield games in a row, the same scenario has played out at launch: gamers purchase said Battlefield iteration in great numbers, resulting in no one being able to play the game due to overloaded servers.
"Despite having a major infrastructure in place, the peak traffic ... 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."1
"In terms of the network services, we have had unprecedented and historic peaks in terms of the activity that we're getting from the Battlefield community and players, and it's caused parts of our networks to experience some outages."2
"We have full support of EA to add as many servers as takes and then some so that everyone can play. This work has already started and servers will be added around the clock with teams working to cover this 24 hours a day so not a moment is wasted. You will be able to play this game and play it lag free!"3 If you weren't able to distinguish them from one another, I forgive you -- they all sound remarkably alike, don't they? That's because, for three Battlefield games in a row, the same scenario has played out at launch: gamers purchase said Battlefield iteration in great numbers, resulting in no one being able to play the game due to overloaded servers.
