Morgan Park
Still looking for my home Wardogs server. If you have a recommendation (preferably NA West), I’d love to hear where you’re playing.
Here’s a neat thought: One of the most popular multiplayer games on the planet right now has no matchmaking button. FPS fans are flocking to Wardogs for its fresh ideas around teamwork, economy, and “all-out warfare.” It’s pulling in the largest crowds this sort of round-based, milsim-y FPS (a category that also includes Squad and Hell Let Loose) has ever seen.
It’s very much filling the Battlefield-shaped hole in my game time, and that’s in no small part due to its server browser.
Man, is it nice to press play on a main menu in 2026 and get options like this:
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Image credit: Bulkhead
Image credit: Bulkhead
Check out that beaut: A complete list of official servers in my region, sortable by players, ping, rulesets, and maps. And would you look at that: A prominent community section featuring persistent servers rentable from third-party vendors.
No forced matchmaking. No skill-based algorithms. No disbanding lobbies (in community servers, at least). This is exactly the sort of convenient, community-forward setup that still appears regularly in niche milsims and indie shooters, and one that fans have been begging Battlefield to get back to.
It was around this time last year that EA was making a big to-do about Battlefield 6’s community server support. Devs insisted that the Portal server browser, which doesn’t support third-party server providers and instead allows players to spin up one semi-persistent lobby at a time, would “tick every box” for a proper server browser.
It did not: At launch, Portal servers were buggy, dominated by XP farming lobbies, and buried under a pile of Netflix menu tiles. As plenty of us predicted, interest in the Portal browser as an alternative to official matchmaking quickly died out, and now it’s only good for goofy minigames and, somehow still, XP farming.
When asked at the time why Battlefield 6 couldn’t just have a real browser—the kind that lets you see all of the official servers as well as community-hosted ones—DICE lead producer David Sirland offered an answer that, in retrospect, is pretty weak sauce.
“Matchmaking servers spin up in seconds (get filled with players), and spin down after the game is over. That couple of seconds, plus 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).”
And yet, here we are: Wardogs has millions of players, and they seem to be navigating those “issues” just fine. Even the supposed drawbacks of manual browsing are barely a thing in Wardogs. There are currently so many official and community servers that finding one with a few spare slots takes seconds, and players cycle in and out of the 100-player matches so often that queues are rarely a long wait.
Meanwhile, the benefits are obvious: Community servers have admins that can punish cheaters and griefers faster than automated tools, and when they’re allowed to flourish, these servers can be recognizable social spaces with regulars and customs. Developer Bulkhead isn’t doing anything unique here, just what most PC shooters did 20 years ago.
The reality is that pulling off a server browser really comes down to will. Battlefield 6 doesn’t have a real, prominent browser because EA doesn’tdon’t want one. DICE built it like a console game (really, like Call of Duty) with algorithmic factors that get thrown off when folks can just hop into whatever server they want. So Portal was the compromise—a walled garden with restrictive, fake-persistent access to dedicated servers. It was a miscalculation about where the wind is blowing in the FPS scene, and it’s still hurting an otherwise great game.
Wardogs’ server browser is far from flawless. Basic features like favoriting and tiered queueing are still on the way, joining a server as a group is harder than it should be, and server admins are missing crucial tools—but it’s a strong start for an early access game, and immediately more legitimate than Battlefield 6’s sorry excuse for community support. In more ways than one, Battlefield could learn from Wardogs and smaller shooters like it.
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