Battlefield 6 players are crying out for a 'real' server browser, and it's about time we demanded the basic FPS feature that Call of Duty killed

I'll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of "community" from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly that I'd join a game in a progress, as other people come and go from a game in progress, and I wondered what the point of the match was if the teams weren't even the same at the end of the match as when they began. Most people's default when running a server was to turn player numbers to max and, in Battlefield's case, "tickets" needed to win as well, but just because the numbers are bigger doesn't mean that it's better pacing for a match, for instance. Matchmaking sets the defaults and ensures a pretty consistent experience from start to finish of each match.

This comment from the developer is true, too.

"Matchmaking servers spin up in seconds (get filled with players), and spin down after the game is over," Sirland wrote in a thread on X last week. "That couple of seconds when servers lose a lot of players mid-game is the only time you can join, which makes it a tricky combination (and full of queuing to join issues).

My preference for the matchmaking experience is reflected across the audience they cater to, and it contributed to an industry focus on matchmaking and the end of server browsers.

But we still need real server browsers.

If we bought a game, we should be able to do what we want with it, including running those max player/max ticket servers that run 24/7 on one map. We should be able to do it without DICE/EA's permission, on our own if we so choose, without salaried staff running master server operations, because one day the revenue this game brings in will not justify the costs to keep it going. We should be able to deal with cheaters by vote kicking them from the server rather than installing increasingly invasive mandatory anti cheat solutions that don't even fully solve the problem anyway, because it's unsolvable.