GRRR Squad Forum

As our BF3 server rental comes up for renewal at the end of October, I've taken the liberty of cancelling the server rental. I can't imagine that any of us will be playing BF3 once BF4 is released.

Which brings us to the matter of a BF4 server. Do we want one? If so, how many slots do we want?

A 12 month server rental with 16 slots will set us back $179.90. That's including a discount for pre-ordering as well as a discount for tweeting about and following gameservers.

We could hold off on a rental until such time as we know what the competitive format is going to be, but that will mean losing pre-order discounts. However, in BF3 we never used our server until the competitive season started.

Thoughts guys? If we're going to pre-order, I would want to get it sorted by the end of next week.

For reference, when BF3 launched we rented a 32 player server, and made it public in order to encourage people to play on it. It was never successful, and after 12 months we downgraded to a 16 player server. Cost wise, it seems that BF4 is pretty much on a par with BF3.

Jarrod, what is the difference between pre-order and normal rental. If the discount on the pre-order is equal to 3 months of rental then it makes more sense to pre-order if not, then it is just QED as I can not see the comps to start before January.

My 2cents on the topic.

Skouperd wrote:Jarrod, what is the difference between pre-order and normal rental. If the discount on the pre-order is equal to 3 months of rental then it makes more sense to pre-order if not, then it is just QED as I can not see the comps to start before January.

My 2cents on the topic.

Good point. The discounts add up to approximately 15%, so not enough to cross the hurdle that you mention. However, there are a couple of other things to consider:

1. Would we want to play friendlies and/or hold practices before January?
2. The server rental also has discounts based on length of rental agreement, with an additional 15% reduction for a 12 month rental period. If we are tied into 12 months anyway, it doesn't matter when we start, as we will need to server rental to last until after the DGC in October.

Yea cost difference is key.

If its cheaper to get it now for a full year then to get it in January then lets do otherwise i say wait till jan.

Unless of course we want to do some internal clan games before then.

I just can not see friendly games being high priority as yet. Most people I would imagine will still be dumb-strucked by the game itself and killing noobs on the public servers. Also, with regard to friendlies, I would imagine there will be at least 1 clan somewhere in South Africa who is more serious (and more cash flushed) than GRRRR to host a server. I just can not see that many friendlies being played that long before the actual comps start. But yeah, unless there are more people that can contribute monthly (if my info is still up to date) to the slush fund otherwise it just doesn't make sense.

we should also consider the size of the server. i feel 16 is too small.
how big is our bf4 contingent? I think we are definitely a larger group than when we started bf3. in which case i think we should get a 32 player server, cause if we look at size of the groups we've been playing in lately its always difficult to get us all on to one server. so we should try the public server thing again.

as for when we should get it... it would be nice to get it now, but if we wait until jan we'll have an accurate assumption of the size of our group.

[2c]
Best possible use is if we have 2 teams then we can get a regular prac going.
Opening it up for public has not worked in previous BF versions as ISP servers outperform and outrank us.
In my experience it has taken a lot of coaxing just to get 10 players on to be worthwhile and then it dies after 3 rounds.
So my vote is, not now.
[/2]

I am with Skoup and Mega, unless there is a massive cost benefit I don't see us utilising the server until after December holidays and once DGL has announced the league format. That is when we will only start with pracs and clan matches

with the squad limit being 5 for BF4, and a team consisting of two squads (10) and possible a commander (11), then we would need 20-22 slots, so a 32 player server should be the minimum?

The slots on a server are completely granular Morph. So we could, if we wanted to, get a 22 player server. The cost is calculated per slot, so going from a 16 player to a 32 player server would pretty much double the cost.

Let's get everyone else's thoughts on this, and then Phats can make a decision.

Clearly, we're going to need to sort out funding before we can get a server anyway. Contributions to the slush fund are very limited, with only a few people making regular payments. Without more funds being injected, we won't be able to afford a server.

It's unfortunate, we have more members than ever at the moment, yet the fund is at a low point.