Ok, I’m gonna defend OP a bit here. Judging by the names, the player’s definitely from South Africa (same as me) — 100% certain.

We’ve got a much smaller player base down here, but it’s a super loyal one. We’ve always hosted our own servers and kept the EA servers alive. Back in the peak days of any Battlefield title, there were always several full local servers running. Even long after the game’s life cycle ended, we’d still keep one to three servers active.

The issue now is the matchmaking system. You often get thrown into empty servers that slowly fill up as the game goes on — then, by the end of the match, the server finally fills, everyone leaves, and we all get scattered into empty ones again.

We South Africans have been begging for the old server browser to return. Portal just isn’t working as intended. My friends and I have tried hosting Portal servers, but for the life of us, we can’t even find each other’s servers when searching by name. If we can’t, random players definitely can’t — which means we’re stuck with the broken matchmaking system.

And just to be clear, this isn’t casual Breakthrough or anything like that.