I know the rules (as per statistics FAQ), and I did some searches around Support and General Discussion forums (forgive me if I missed this discussion happening before), and I know that 64+ servers would be automatically cut off from back end. But I also know that official (?) 96-player test server had the stats ran and counted.

So I wonder if that has been amended, or is there any way to get a special permission for F|H weekly game night we are trying to set up (see general forum community survey topic). It is not deal-breaker, in that I would rather use 64-player server to have stats, rather than 64+ that is rarely expected to get over that limit, but I would like to hear some rationale for that from the developers as to why that is (beside obvious “current maps are not balanced for large number of players”).

What?

Regular weekly game night on the official stats-enabled server (VBIOS, FHT or others). In comparison, North American players have tradition of gathering every Thursday (and sometimes Friday) to play (before on WOLF servers, and now on WaW server), and as such people always know that there is at least one or two nights a week, when they are guaranteed to find players on an active server with active admins. Such game night can be coincident with some open event once in awhile on stock maps with official stats.

Why?

Many people do not care where to play, but there is a sizeable group of players who, for various reasons, do not play on (frequently busy) 762 servers, or prefer an alternative if they can. The reasons could be: desire to play with official stats, players could prefer different set of rules, map list, administration style, etc.

This initiative is in no way targeted against 762 community, but our experience and conversations with many players had shown, that there is a need for alternative servers that need to be supported, so that the once popular servers such as WOLF or HSLAN would not disappear. Also, giving the players who do not play on 762 servers (a surprising many) an ability to regularly participate in public play would increase the active player base, and increase popularity of FH2

How?

We had organized the public opinion poll, where players choose week days and time intervals most convenient for them (European evenings), and also additional questions relating to the tournaments and statistics (official v. 762). Note that this poll would be posted in various forums, but one needs to participate only once.

Instructions

The poll is given in English to reach as many players as possible. If some questions are unclear after reading these instructions, we could help. It would be welcome, if the word about this survey would be spread around different language communities and instructions would be translated.

Follow the link to FH2 European weekly game night poll (Important: after submitting the form, save the link for editing your answer. Unfortunately, the way the Google Docs works, errors and duplicate answers can only be fixed manually in a spreadsheet, and automatic results would remain ruined/skewed).

• Days. Note that while the weekends seems an obvious choice, week nights could be even more successful, because on the weekend people participate in tournaments, party, leave town on holiday, and so forth.
• Time. Time is given in arbitrary two-hour intervals in UTC. Use time-zone converter to see how those intervals relate to your zone.
• Tournaments. Indicate if you participate in popular FH2 tournaments, and if you can participate in public play even during an active campaign (for some people once a week is enough, while others can do both tournaments and public).
• Statistics. Note your attitude in relation to official stats and 762 stats: do you avoid 762 altogether (for various reasons), do you prefer official statistics, or you do not care either way, but would like to have a choice of maps and servers on any given day.

P. S. Please, spread the word about this poll in social networks, if you think this is a good idea. We would also like to hear the input from the developers to see their attitude towards this initiative, and if it would merit official blessing.

Rather noob question, for I don’t know much about this stuff. Searched the forums, found one topic with some arcane insight, so I decided to open general knowledge thread.

Option I: game hosting. I haven’t found any hosting companies supporting mods, and running ranked vanilla BF2 for $1-1.25 a slot seems incredibly expensive (I do remember that it cost 3 times that before, but still). I don’t know how some clans could afford several 64 player servers. Why it has to be so expensive, does it really put such a high load on the servers that it should cost much more than average web-hosting (even cheaper options by solid companies can sustain several medium-to-high load websites)?

Anyway, if anyone has any info on that, would be helpful.

Option II: own server. I cannot rent dedicated server, and finding location at buddy’s office or local university is a rather remote possibility as of yet. So I’m thinking about using my own server.

One of the variants I could pursue is to build new server (I want to setup network share, so, instead of dedicated networked storage unit, I could just use always-on server, that would run some Linux setup that would share these functions).

What would be system requirements for decent server? Running 64-player server is not do-or-die proposition (after all there are hslan and Wolfgaming), but does it really need to be some kind of killer machine, or could reliable operation be achieved on modest modern setup? Could I possibly run several servers at once (mapping them to different ports on same IP)?

What are the bandwith requirements? I have 5 Mbit cable — is it enough, or I should really invest in business-grade channel? How do I setup NAT? I’ve heard of some programs that allow use your ISP IP for peer-to-peer communications, but I can’t remember the names right now.

* * *

Technicals: I have issues setting up server. I have spare machine that I wanted to try setup server on to check it out. It’s 32-bit Ubuntu box with 768 GB of RAM and 2.4 GHz P4. I downloaded linux server from EA FTP pub, but not sure if I got the right one It comes as shell script that was archived with gzip (.sh.gz), but archive manager in Ubuntu gives me error saying that it is not a valid archive, so I cannot even unzip it. There is another version with .tar.gz extension, but its version number is lower than the one I downloaded.