As none of you may have realized, we’ve killed the BF2 server for the time being. It was a waste of resources, especially with the massive memory leak in the 1.01 patch, and there’s no visible light at the end of the tunnel. The resource usage would have been acceptable if the server was populated, but it hogged nearly as much while empty, which was most of the time – kinda’ hard to justify.
Our BF2 demo server was in the top 30 most played Demo servers, so what happened? Most of you are probably aware of this, but for the sake of those who aren’t familiar: Just days before BF2 retail hit the shelves, EA sprang the suprise of locked weapons which could only be accessed by copious amounts of time spent playing on “ranked” servers. The requirements to become ranked are extremely strict (read: ethically suspect), but the end result is that unranked servers are sitting empty while the ranked servers are packed 24/7.
We’ll find a better way to use that server capacity, and it doesn’t appear that Hardfought BF2 will be sorely missed.