There are many perks of running your own server, everything from being able to boot people who annoy you from the game to printing out t-shirts that legitimately read “I am the lord of the server, ruling my mini-fiefdom with an iron fist”. Also, until now, in Battlefield 3 you could bug the game and become immortal. The T-shirt thing is the real draw though, surely.
That “until now” is the operative point. A new server update is bringing a number of changes to DICE’s shooter.
According to a post over on the Battlefield 3 blog, theupdateis coming on 8 November and will fix “a bug where server admins could exploit the system to effectively become immortal on his/her server.”
On top of that here is the full list of changes:
“Battlefield 3 Game Server R33 change list
1) (Server renters on PC only) The “rcon” server info command now reports external IP and port as well as information regarding whether the backend queue is enabled or not.
2) Fixed an occasional issue where console servers changed max player counts incorrectly.
3) We now enforce a minimum player count of 4 on both PC and consoles (PC previously had no such limitation while console servers had 2 players as the limit) to be able to exit preround on Ranked servers. You will still be able to move around freely in preround, but the match doesn’t officially start (and thus no stats are affected) until at least 4 players have joined. This goes for both PC and console servers. This will make it harder to easily use Ranked servers as boosting servers.
4) “Hardcore no map” is now a proper preset on both the server side and backend. This means console users can now filter between hardcore servers with and/or without the “no map” setting.
5) We fixed a bug where server admins could exploit the system to effectively become immortal on his/her server.
6) We introduced a number of server stability improvements which should lead to less crashes throughout. Two specific crashes that we have eliminated are:
A) Servers running 9 or more maps that would crash when loading the 9th map
B) Servers running high player counts in combination with very high ticket count where end game reports would stall out the server”
So, no more god mode for the admins. Still, at least they’ve still got their t-shirts.