Server Not Filling? Try THIS!! (BF3)

[Daslol]

Well one of my servers is back to full, the other three have zero people in them.

[Klikster]

I've had 100% success doing this. Though sometimes I wait for about 45 minutes, it will fill. I'm not gonna guarantee that it will work for you, but here's what I did.

Set your server to QuickMatch settings.
Turn off idle kick timer (so you can alt-tab and not be kicked once its going)
Stop your server, Start your server, then Join your server once it's up.
Alt-tab into your server control page
run vars.maxPlayers "8" in your server rcon control (procon or NFo CP)
Allow 8 people to join to get the game started
run vars.maxPlayers "10" in your server rcon
Let a few people join.

Keep repeating that until your at max. I usually go up in 2's from 8-16 players. Then I increase by 4, once I hit 20 players I set it to 32 (which is my max)

My one question, when you update the vars.maxPlayers.. do you need to change the map/round to enable the extra slots?

I tried something like this with a clanmate last night, and we managed to get 4 people into our server and 2 of them told us they joined via quickmatch (I have default settings with 0 idle timeout and 2 player minimum start, 1 player preround start)

So this is clearly something in the right direction, although if I need to re-seed my server every time it / EA / DICE crashes I won't have a social life. :/

[DobbsMT]

Glad it's somewhat working for you guys. We all have to share our tricks of the trade with each other so we can help get each others servers populated!

Anyone running R7 already by chance? Need to know how often crashes are occurring. I haven't updated yet because the server has been full, I'll probably update tonight if it empties out.

We were patched to R7 last night. The results have been great. Even when latency spiked last night (120ms for a couple of hrs) from my usual 20-30ms, the server did a great job of handling it. Rubber banding was far less noticeable or even present.

Server has been near capacity all morning and through much of the evening with zero issues. Players are reporting a lag-free experience. Things are looking good.

[kraze]

EA was supposed to be doing some maintenance in the early morning of today. That might of been the cause.

[zaNe]

I've had 100% success doing this. Though sometimes I wait for about 45 minutes, it will fill. I'm not gonna guarantee that it will work for you, but here's what I did.

Set your server to QuickMatch settings.
Turn off idle kick timer (so you can alt-tab and not be kicked once its going)
Stop your server, Start your server, then Join your server once it's up.
Alt-tab into your server control page
run vars.maxPlayers "8" in your server rcon control (procon or NFo CP)
Allow 8 people to join to get the game started
run vars.maxPlayers "10" in your server rcon
Let a few people join.

Keep repeating that until your at max. I usually go up in 2's from 8-16 players. Then I increase by 4, once I hit 20 players I set it to 32 (which is my max)

My one question, when you update the vars.maxPlayers.. do you need to change the map/round to enable the extra slots?

I tried something like this with a clanmate last night, and we managed to get 4 people into our server and 2 of them told us they joined via quickmatch (I have default settings with 0 idle timeout and 2 player minimum start, 1 player preround start)

So this is clearly something in the right direction, although if I need to re-seed my server every time it / EA / DICE crashes I won't have a social life. :/

Nope! No need to restart, the maxPlayers will update instantaneously so you won't have to restart or reload the map. I usually populate my RUSH server on Operation Metro, and my Conquest Server I start out on Seine Crossing. Usually everything goes well up until a crash.

[gotchay]

I know this is a bit offtopic but any know why I can't find my server via GameTracker?

http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/se ... 87d359361/

edit: Also the trick of lowering the slots to 8 and then increasing it by 2 worked until I got about ~16 people in. Weird this is, I wake this morning with a full server.

[shownder]

I've had 100% success doing this. Though sometimes I wait for about 45 minutes, it will fill. I'm not gonna guarantee that it will work for you, but here's what I did.

Set your server to QuickMatch settings.
Turn off idle kick timer (so you can alt-tab and not be kicked once its going)
Stop your server, Start your server, then Join your server once it's up.
Alt-tab into your server control page
run vars.maxPlayers "8" in your server rcon control (procon or NFo CP)
Allow 8 people to join to get the game started
run vars.maxPlayers "10" in your server rcon
Let a few people join.

Keep repeating that until your at max. I usually go up in 2's from 8-16 players. Then I increase by 4, once I hit 20 players I set it to 32 (which is my max)

Got my servers going twice today. Had em going 32/32 (both) then they crashed so I had to try it again, and it worked again for me. So far 4/4. Not bad I say.

This actually worked for us last night. I think this proves that the QM fills based on server fullness. By shrinking down the max players you shrink down the ammount needed to reach a specific full %.

[shownder]

I've had 100% success doing this. Though sometimes I wait for about 45 minutes, it will fill. I'm not gonna guarantee that it will work for you, but here's what I did.

Set your server to QuickMatch settings.
Turn off idle kick timer (so you can alt-tab and not be kicked once its going)
Stop your server, Start your server, then Join your server once it's up.
Alt-tab into your server control page
run vars.maxPlayers "8" in your server rcon control (procon or NFo CP)
Allow 8 people to join to get the game started
run vars.maxPlayers "10" in your server rcon
Let a few people join.

Keep repeating that until your at max. I usually go up in 2's from 8-16 players. Then I increase by 4, once I hit 20 players I set it to 32 (which is my max)

Got my servers going twice today. Had em going 32/32 (both) then they crashed so I had to try it again, and it worked again for me. So far 4/4. Not bad I say.

This actually worked for us last night. I think this proves that the QM fills based on server fullness. By shrinking down the max players you shrink down the ammount needed to reach a specific full %.

Apparently, I can't edit...

On a side note, this method ALSO works if you lower the round start lower than 8. I just did it at 4! People are more likely to stick around if the game starts quicker.

[Klikster]

You can also lower the idle timeout to 0 alongside the playerstartcount. I have my startcount at 2 and my preround at 1 and I still got quick match joinees last night!

[TimSad]

Damn! I was messing around with that vars.maxplayers thing and got it to what I wanted, 48/48. Then the next map loaded so I was gonna put vars.maxplayers to 44 but accidentally did vars.maxplayer4 and it emptied out the whole server excpet for the first 4 players!

[zaal]

Perhaps this does work. I've managed to get my server to 13 of 16 slots in about 10 minutes. I'm going to try boosting that to 20 then 24 as the server fills and will report back.

[zeroumus]

I have gotten this to work on a 32 players server

the question now is, can i use this technique on a 64 player server in large mode

[zaNe]

Conquest Large is not in QM rotation, so I would assume that it would be a bit harder. Perhaps if you set it to rush or something, got it to 32 players, then changed it to CQ-Large, you could fill it. But I'm not 100% sure on this - it's worth a try! This is the time to experiment!

[Jeff7477]

Is there any way for the daemon to have the ability to modify max players? Have it set so that it always keeps the server +2 of what the current population is or something?

[TimeX]

This is not something that our admin daemon does currently. We could maybe look into it, but I would hate to see time invested into such a function if it isn't needed soon.