War(ts) And All: Battlefield 4 Servers Get Anti-Lag Uprade
The war on rubber-banding
Battlefield 4 is kind of like Humpty Dumpty. It launched, pretty much immediately face-planted off its precarious perch, and all the king's horses and all the king's men still haven't managed to fully put poor ol' Humpty back together again. There's a good game in there somewhere, but lag and a smattering of related (and unrelated) issues threaten to drown it beneath the Megalodon-infested seas. So DICE has finally elected to bring out the big guns in the form of new server hardware. The question is, did it work?
New server hardware, according to DICE, should get rid of rubber-banding - a type of lag in which the server chokes and teleports players back a few steps - in 64-player matches. The studio explained in a blog post:
"We have invested in new hardware to resolve [rubber-banding issues] and deployed new higher-performance servers this week. In preparation, we conducted a significant amount of testing before installing the new servers to ensure they would correct the issue. We are already seeing performance improvement with 64-player matches and expect this to continue."
"While the process took longer than we would’ve liked, we wanted to be 100% sure it was done right and that the long-term solution was properly in place."
The effects of this update should be especially pronounced in the new Naval Strike DLC, which has apparently been a big ol' ball of rubber bands since day one. Here's hoping DICE is right, seeing as that sort of thing is pretty much a deal-breaker in a reflex intensive FPS like BF4.
EA and DICE's wartorn opus has improved since launch, but slow and steady isn't the best approach to a race when you're supposed to have already crossed the finish line. I have no doubt that they're trying, but still... yikes. Who's playing BF4 these days? How much better has it gotten? Which issues still bother you the most?