DICE and Battlefield Studios has done a fantastic job on the launch version of Battlefield 6, but with Season 1 around the corner there are some major issues that need to be addressed.
As the biggest launch in Battlefield history, BF6 came with more exploits than anyone expected. While aggressive anti-cheat (mostly) kept cheaters away from matchmaking, a large number of XP and unlock farm servers were released within the game’s Portal custom game mode.
Just weeks after release, DICE released an update that nerfed every XP farm in the game with custom servers now offering a miniscule percentage of the XP they used to dish out. However, this has upset a number of players on non-XP farm servers with slower progression hitting players who were playing normal custom games.
Speaking to fans on the Steam blog, Battlefield 6 community manager Shepard explained that the team is working on a “curated list of community servers” that will continue to offer PvP and PvE experiences with proper progression.
“Many of you want full progression in solo/co-op and on curated custom servers – not just in matchmade PvP,” the community manager said, adding that the recent changes have introduced some “real frustration about expectations vs. what shipped”.
Shepard explains that the curated community servers with XP will have a number of “anti-farm guardrails” to make sure that players can’t simply unlock everything in a few matches. These include a minimum difficulty, pings for activity checks including “AFK/loop detection” and the introduction of “sensible XP-per-minute caps” so that community servers can’t massively overrule traditional matchmaking.
The new Battlefield 6 curated servers wil also include “clear labelling”, according to the developer. Players looking to Labs custom modes and maps will see a tag saying whether the options “Progression Eligible” or not in the server browser and the pre-match screen.
It makes a lot of sense, and Battlefield 6 isn’t the only game with user-generated content to suffer this issue. Countless Fortnite XP farms are created and shut down every day, and Halo Infinite has been forced to introduce similar detections for its Forge-based custom games and maps. Unfortunately, it’s become a necessary evil.
Even so, some XP Farm servers will undoubtedly slip through the cracks as they always do, and the developers are asking players to flag offenders if they “spot obvious farm servers”. Additionally, DICE wants players to report the opposite to help them understand what should be eligible as a curated server if they get things wrong.
While Battlefield 6 did initially promise that every map and mode on Portal would have 100% XP gain, it’s easy to understand why that is no longer the case. In just a few days, this promise was already butchered by the rise of XP Farms allowing players to quickly shoot through progression ahead of everyone else. Sure, the elimination of these servers may annoy some players, but it seems like the best step forward.
