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[Update: EA denies servers have been deleted]
Customers have been complaining of a lack of official servers for Battlefield 3, claiming it is almost impossible to find EA and DICE hosting for the shooter.
A few weeks ago, the studio made the surprise move of allowing rental servers for console gamers at a cost of $30 for 30 days.
Now, those gamers say DICE official servers have completely disappeared, and EA servers all but impossible to find.
Venturebeat’s Dan Crawley ran a search for official servers, but found only 17 EA servers, and not a single DICE server.
An ask me anything session with community manager Daniel Matros gave players a change to communicate their dissatisfaction.
"I haven’t played in over two weeks because of it; abusive admins and 2000% ticket servers are everywhere and I can’t seem to find a normal server with vanilla BF3," said redditt user hilkito.
"I thought Rent-a-server was not going to affect my habits of gaming, but it seems I was wrong.”
Other posters shared similar sentiments, and placed the blame on rental servers.
"I’m looking for official DICE/EA servers on the Xbox 360. There are none. You took that out, and let kids pay for your hosting," said another disgruntled gamer.
But DICE pointed out it was community demand that led to the adoption of rental servers in the first place, and that as servers and space to house them were a limited rescource, players would have to chose.
“There is only so much physical space and digital space where you can have servers. The community requested and we delivered,” wrote Matros.
He went on to say that nothing was permanent in Battlefield, and he would take the community concerns back to DICE.
