BF4 & blaze

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Tag
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BF4 & blaze

Post by Tag »

John ... has EA/DICE released any details about BF4's backend ? will it still be blaze ?

Certainly this doesn't apply to everybody, but BF3 servers have been a nightmare to manage so far with all the dumps/crashes/ddos attacks ... I'm just trying to see if BF4 will continue that trend.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by Edge100x »

I do not have any information yet on BF4.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by TacTicToe »

If there is one thing you can count on, is EA to screw things up. With each new game release, they seem to always under estimate the amount of Blaze power needed for a new games release. I remember there being a short moratorium on new BC2 servers for a while. I would bank it will continue to be their famous Blaze Plasma backend. There never seem to learn.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by kungfubeer »

It was not much better with GameSpy and BF2. DICE always has underestimated how many people will upgrade when they either patch or sell a DLC also.

Based on their track record, they are not getting better. I would not be surprised if the same bugs introduced into BF3 on release will also be present in BF4 on release day - at least many of them. This is DICE historically.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by TimeX »

There is certainly some truth to that. If any of you remember the BF:BC2 launch, it also had many problems. Over the months, many of the problems in that game were fixed, and even BF3 is much better than it was at launch. Both games still have some problems though, many of them similar.

The main issue that comes up is the mass player drops due to Blaze (and Plasma before that). That problem is due to design and not bugs, and I am guessing will be a problem with BF4 also. Hopefully I am wrong about that.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by jaythegreat1 »

TimeX wrote:There is certainly some truth to that. If any of you remember the BF:BC2 launch, it also had many problems. Over the months, many of the problems in that game were fixed, and even BF3 is much better than it was at launch. Both games still have some problems though, many of them similar.

The main issue that comes up is the mass player drops due to Blaze (and Plasma before that). That problem is due to design and not bugs, and I am guessing will be a problem with BF4 also. Hopefully I am wrong about that.
Blaze, while wasn't all that great in the first place... has been a big pile of crap this past week. We've experienced this nightly.. roughly 1-3 times.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by Tag »

I witnessed the BC2 moratorium on new servers when it happened, but I honestly don't remember having as many service interruptions with Plasma as I do now with Blaze.

Just like Jay, I'm witnessing more crashes/dumps this week on my 3 servers. What's worse is that sometimes when they crash, they won't let anyone back in unless you manually reboot 'em.

For anyone who happens to seed their servers, I'm sure you realize how much of a struggle it is to get 4 players to start a freaking round (probably one of the biggest pinheaded decisions ever made in BF3's ongoing development). Once you pass that burden, you'll be lucky to pass 16 hrs before blaze dumps all your players out, and you'll have to get right back in to re-seed the servers.

Seeing as how BF4 is already using Battlelog, I doubt EA/DICE plan on making any changes to how their backend works. I seriously hope I'm wrong on this, but we'll see !
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by TimSad »

Tag wrote:What's worse is that sometimes when they crash, they won't let anyone back in unless you manually reboot 'em.
I HATE when that happens. It's happened a few times to me as well and what sucks about it is that if your not around to restart, no one will be able to join the server until you are around.

If they don't change their stupid system, Imma be real angry.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by kraze »

While their system does have flaws. I am curious if anyone has any suggestions on what they could do to improve it?

Many think that moving the servers to the US would solve the issue, but I imagine any foreign users would still face the same problem. This would also remove any direct contact Dice would have with their machines to fix potential issues and hardware failures.
@Kraze^NFo> Juski has a very valid point
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by Edge100x »

The primary way to improve Blaze would be to allow servers to continue running for longer after the Blaze connection fails. That is, instead of dropping all players if the server is unable to report its latest batch of stats, it would continue allowing gameplay while retrying in the background. New players would also be unable to connect until the connection to Blaze is reestablished.

Switching Blaze to UDP in order to monitor and compensate for packet loss at a finer-grained level could help.

The game would benefit from an architecture that allows PB to run asynchronously (with hard-timeframe internal API calls/IPC), instead of causing calls to PB to block the main thread. The same may be needed for rcon and logging processes.

Having a dedicated thread that rapidly accepts UDP traffic and pushes it into an internal buffer while checking for obviously malformed traffic (from IPs without game state that aren't querying the server or trying to connect, for instance) would make a significant difference in terms of (D)DoS resilience.

Valve's games have some of these measures built-in already.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by TimSad »

I think John knows exactly what should be done. DICE/EA should temp hire him and put him charge of the way these things work.
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by kraze »

I had a feeling John was going to ruin that little game. :D
@Kraze^NFo> Juski has a very valid point
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by TimSad »

lol
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Re: BF4 & blaze

Post by jaythegreat1 »

So... what you're saying is, we should ask EA to do something logical?

Scary...
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