the "news" about closing the BF2 server were seen by some of you but thats not the only changes we will do in near future. we talked and decided this in our clan member area. so we would like to inform also our regular player about this changes and why we need to do this. for that reason i post the basic argument here too and hope that we will get your future support also.
time for changes...Most of you know we bought our own dedicated server from our hoster gamingdeluxe some years ago to host our own games and website. This was in time we all playing BF2, BC2 and also BF3. So it was a lot cheaper to had running this games on our own dedicated server as rent a game server for each game but time goes by and also the bad news comes that Gaming Deluxe is no official EA hoster so we can´t run BF4 on our own server. In the beginning of BF4 we always had the hope that EA will expand the list of the official EA hoster and gamingdeluxe will be one of them. Seriously we are at the point now we can say this will not happen anymore.
Also with the gamespy shut off and the corresponding collapse of bf2, we have a totally new situation now. Sadly some of the old BF2 guys can´t play it anymore or move on to other games. However, it turns out that the good old BF2 No Fly server is nearly empty every day and it looks like BF2 is really dead now.
Of course we also lost the donations for the BF2 server because who should donate if nobody play it anymore? Nevertheless we need this donations because our monthly costs are the same, no matter if the server is used or not, you can notice into the donations that we going to struggle each month more and more.
So we thinking about to make a "big cut" and downgrade our setup back to basics to bring back our monthly cost to a more reasonable amount.
This is the setup we are running at the moment:
1. BF2 no fly is nearly empty every day. its a shame about our glorious no fly but at this point bf2 is dead.
2. BF2 coop server is not used.
3. BC2 server is also only used from time to time and mostly from not NRU guys.
4. BF3 flying server
5. BF3 24/7 caspian server
6. BF3 something server
7. BF4 server ( slots decreased to 24 nets paying period )
8. TS3 server
Our monthly costs are all in all nearly £140
And this is the setup we would like to go:
1. 1x BF3 server 48 slots ( with all maps and running votemaps ); £42.72/month
2. 1x BF4 server 24 slots. we still reduced the slots from 48 to 24 to save money ( with all maps and running votemaps ); £21.60/month
3. 1x TS3 server with 25 slots; £5.10/month
4. Webpage hosted externally; around £40/year
So overall we should end up around £75 a month for this setup and so we could nearly halve our monthly costs. This also means we can handle this amount of costs with no big risk if the regular paying/playing members still donate their £5-10 each month than we have no big problem to reach this £75.
Gaming Deluxe will repurchase our old server and offer us £200 for that, so this means they will count it into our future monthly fee.
But you have to recognize get rid of our dedi server and also get rid of our big amount of monthly costs still means we will not have a BF2 or a BC2 server anymore. this should be clear for all because we can not rent a game server for that it is only used at 1 or 2 days a month by 3-4 members because the proportionality is not given for that. Just for BF2 its a hard decision because that is the basic we all come from.
At the same time this decisive point also means we are better prepared for the future because we have free money capacity for other games. I guess, with our actual cost we have no chance to run a coming BF5 server because we would have to pay this too and than we would reach nearly £200 monthly costs and to be honest, this is a point you have to say this is not realistic anymore.
If we downgrade our setup we can talk about running new games/rent a server at every time because we have more manageable costs. Also we hope that this focusing on just 1 BF3 and 1 BF4 server bring back some more unity because its even more probably that we play together on our server.
