Battlefield 6 Server Performance and Player Queues Addressed by Dev

Battlefield 6 is doing everything it can to prepare for a large amount of players at launch. If you played the Battlefield 6 beta, you likely had to sit in a queue to get into the action. While these queue times were at the worst when the game very first opened up its servers, players did have to wait a few minutes to play during peak times. It was hardly unbearable, but it clearly showed a high level of demand for the game beyond what Battlefield Studios could’ve been expecting. However, the servers never crashed and there was never any sort of unplanned downtime, showing that the studio was on top of things.

With that said, there is no early access period for the full Battlefield 6 launch. So that means players will all be swarming the gates on launch day to get in. If you’re like me, you are probably anticipating some server queues on Battlefield 6‘s release day, but the team at Battlefield Studios is putting a lot of measures in place to make things go as smoothly as possible.

Battlefield 6 Team Is Overpreparing to Avoid Server Queues at Launch

I spoke with Christian Buhl, the Studio Technical Director at Ripple Effect (one of the teams working on Battlefield 6), and asked him about how they plan to prepare for release. Battlefield is infamous for having launch issues, including server problems, but the team learned a lot from the Battlefield 6 beta and are preparing accordingly by simulating the amount of players they expect at launch.

“We’ve made many adjustments to our projections thanks to the success of our open beta,” said Buhl. “All of the stuff I said about stability and performance also applies to server stability and server performance, so we’ve been putting a lot of effort into that as well. I mean a little bit of behind the scenes, we run a test where we basically simulate whatever our target is, whether it’s a million or four million. We set a target for the number of players we want to have connected to our systems at a time or at launch and we run a simulation with simulated players.

“And guess what? The first time we run it, it doesn’t work, right? Some system falls over, something breaks. Great, but it broke then, right? It broke during our testing and then we fix it. We add machines, we optimize that system and we keep repeating that until we hit the numbers that we feel confident that we think we need to hit for launch. So, that’s the approach we’ve been taking to that.”

As for the server queues, you probably shouldn’t expect to see them much at launch for Battlefield 6. Buhl stated that they aren’t planning on having to use the queues as they are overestimating how many players will be playing Battlefield 6 at launch to prepare their servers. You may see queues the moment the game launches just to steadily allow players in as opposed to flooding the game, but that’s as much as they expect to have queues unless the launch goes well and beyond their projections.

“We’re always going to have that as a tool, but we are planning on not needing it for launch,” he noted. “We have projections and then we’re preparing for more than our projections to make sure that as much as possible, we don’t have to have server queues for launch. Now, just to caveat, we also use the server queue for rate limiting. So the moment we turn the game on, if a million people connect in the first minute, we’re going to have a queue just as we move people in.

“But other than that, we’re not planning on [using queues]. We have a cap, but we’re setting the cap much higher than we are hoping we hit. I mean, it’d be great for me if we go over that cap as well. But yeah, we’re doing everything we can to avoid having to use the cap during launch, but we will always prioritize having a good experience for our players over just opening the flood gates and letting too many players in.”

Battlefield 6 will release on October 10th.

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