With Battlefield 3 right around the corner, MyGaming has been catching up with local gaming service providers to find out what they have learnt from the beta testing phase and what we can expect when the game launches on Friday, 28 October 2011.
We had a chat with WAGE Games Master Robert Tait who said: “There was an overwhelming response to the Battlefield 3 beta run. It has been great seeing the community in general join us in the testing of Battlefield 3.”
“In terms of administrative overheads, we had logged approximately 130 hours. This was spent on establishing servers, testing and maintaining, ensuring that the servers are kept to a set quality level and that complaints were attended to. Additional admin time was required due to instability of the Battlefield 3 beta,” said Tait.
“2,366 emails were exchanged between WAGE, various other GSP’s and the developers themselves, DICE.”
Server load and bandwidth
“We initially started with a single test server on beta launch day, finally ending off with around seven servers as the demand increased,” he continued. “On a few busy occasions we had around 350 players on our servers simultaneously.”
“There was such a demand for servers that as soon as an additional server was made available to the public it had been swamped with players waiting to join. We then saw the full demand and requirements of the local gaming community.”
“Average bandwidth usage per player was approximately 68Kbps, which appears to work out to a total of 230MB’s used per hour,” said Tait.
What WAGE has learnt
“The beta testing phase has been a great success due to the number of players from this great community who have participated in helping us test the load on our servers. We have realised the full demand of South African gamers with regards to providing them with the servers they want and listening to the problems they have identified, of which we will take note of and rectify,” said Tait.
Improvements
“With the end of the beta phase, we have realised exactly what the Battlefield 3 servers require in terms of hardware. We have additional hardware on which we will be hosting more servers. Soon we aim at improving our fleet further by acquiring additional server machines which will provide us with much needed RAM and CPU power. The servers will be running on cleaned and tweaked boxes, the aim of this being to reduce latency experienced by members of the community,” explained Tait.
Number of servers
“We aim to have around four servers at launch. Once additional resources are made available we will increase that number to match demand. As part of our ever-growing desire to becoming more involved in the community, we will be listening for any game mode requests or server alterations.”
• /WAGE/ Armored Fury
• /WAGE/ Anvil Actual
• /WAGE/ Ticonderoga
• /WAGE/ Hood
• /WAGE/ Essex
• /WAGE/ Illustrious
“We have been taking note of what the community wants and value their input. This helps us better the gaming community in general and allows us to provide decent servers for gamers to use. We are excited for the launch; it is bound to be a great success for us all. We will be looking forward to interacting with the community and having some fun time in-game. Roll on BF3!” concluded Tait.
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