MyGaming has been running a series of discussions with local gaming providers to find out their experience of the Battlefield 3 beta testing phase from the hosting perspective.
Hype Gamez is one such provider – but they are differentiated slightly in that, not only will they be hosting public Battlefield 3 servers, but also renting out servers to consumers who want their own for purposes such as clan practice and competitions.
“We could not provide BF3 servers fast enough,” said Kim Attree, Hype Gamez Technical Director. “The initial rush had us adding servers and having those servers fill up in a matter of minutes, and having to add more – in the end we settled on 14 x 32-player servers, and when Caspian Border was added to the Beta test, 6 x 64-player Caspian Border Servers and 6 x 32-player Operation Metro Servers.”
Hype Gamez experience roughly 80Kbps traffic at the client end, with average pings between client and server being ±45ms during peak usage times.
“Bandwidth consumption server side, with 14 servers and 448 slots full, was 30.3 Mbps, which makes it one of the most bandwidth hungry games in memory,” said Attree.
“We had live running servers up for 98% of the allotted Beta testing timeframe (26 September 2011 – 10 October 2011). Our highest number of connected players was 448 unique players, with over 1,200 unique players using our servers for the beta test,” said Attree.
“We took a different hardware approach than most RSP’s – feeling that hyperthreading was not going to increase performance or provide more gaming instances per core – we instead opted for AMD Opteron Hex-Core Processors running at 3.5 Ghz – where other RSP’s kept to Xeons and i7 Processors,” explained Attree.
“Our hunch paid off in the fact that we were able to run more gameservers/slots per physical server and still had reserve resources available for additional game servers if they were required. Our CPU’s ran full 64-player instances with less than 40% usage on a single core, and we are proud of the results.”
“We’ll be keeping to our original specifications, since it seems the final netcode of the game will be more polished and reliable. Hype Gamez will be offering a fair amount of servers, [while trying] not to flood the available server pool. We’d rather end up with full player servers than a plethora of empty ones,” said Attree. “We will be aiming to support 400-500 players on our servers.”
Speaking about the rental side of the business, Attree said “We have already signed up a number of BF3 customers, and their servers will be online and available on launch day. Our infrastructure held up extremely well under the increased player load, and our tech staff played a total of 40 hours on Hype Gamez servers to make sure there were no lag or other issues affecting gameplay performance.”
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Hype Gamez Battlefield 3 beta testing feedback << Comments and views
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