Battlefield 2042 players in South Africa held hostage to server admins due to diminishing player base
Regions with the lowest population are really taking the brunt of Battlefield 2042's dwindling player numbers.
Battlefield 2042 is not a very popular game right now, this much is clear. But while it's easy to overstate just how empty servers can be, it's still fairly simple to get into a match in most parts of the world. Where that lack of player interest really hurts, however, is places with a smaller audience to begin with.
This has been a problem for Battlefield games in the past. Places like South Africa, for instance, are so far away from most other server hubs that players in the country can only really get a decent connection to local servers. As the future of Battlefield 2042 remains in question, more and more people are abandoning the game.
This drop is even more pronounced in those regions, and that's especially true for Portal mode. In Portal, players can create and control experiences. Anyone can easily modify game rules and publish a server for others to see and join. Unfortunately, having a small player pool tends to push everyone to the few most active servers, and leaves the rest with two or three players - because no one is going to wait for them to fill up.
As Reddit user Vandiedakaf experienced, however, this could give admins of the most popular servers a bit of a power trip, seeing as they can quite literally dictate how the game is played.
"For about the last week or so the only way to get a game in South Africa is to browse for games in Portal," Vandiedakaf explained.
"It's pretty much first-come first-serve. There simply aren't enough players to fill multiple servers so the first person to host a server for the night pretty much has full control over the game for the rest of the players in the region."
According to them, the server admin behind the most popular server in South Africa the past few days has been exercising their power, banning players for swearing, and the Reddit user in question for calling them out. Though it's hard to ascertain which party is in the wrong here, 'badmins' - as the community has taken to calling them - are not new phenomena to Battlefield.
In fact, you could easily find examples of this today if you go back to any older Battlefield title. The fewer the servers, the more players are going to congregate, giving server admins of the popular few undue power. Of course, those games are years-old, so that's to be expected. But Battlefield 2042 only came out in November last year, so this isn't a problem it should be running into this early in its life.