Battlefield 2 - Globally Ranked Servers

'Battlefield 2' by Electronic Arts & Dice Entertainment, is an online First Person Shooter (FPS) computer game based on the present (Middle Eastern) and potential (China) war time conflicts.

To play the game (with any excitement) you need to connect to a dedicated server on the internet where other people also connect to and play on. An ideal dedicated server to connect to would be one that is geographically close to where you are playing from. This is so that when you do something like, for instance - fire your weapon, the dedicated server receives the information immediately. If there is any delay in the transport of this information, as most online gamers will know, it can be mean the difference between living and dying.

'Battlefield 2' has a unique feature that to date no other FPS has offered which is the Global Ranking statistics system. The system is a central database which privileged service providers around the globe running dedicated servers send in real-time their game results to. Information like: kill scores, flag captures, time played, accuracy, awards, rank, etc, are all tracked, along with which unlocked weapons you have - these are awarded to you as you go up the ranks of the game.

The privileged service providers running the globally ranked dedicated servers are selected by Electronic Arts. More service providers are selected when there appears to be increased demand for them i.e. if the globally ranked servers are always full then they select more service providers to host more ranked servers.

Games Networks, who were not selected, can still run dedicated servers with the publicly available unranked dedicated server software however, however, they are quite pointless since no one plays on them.

Presently, in Australia there are a total of 3 service providers running the 'Battlefield 2' global ranked servers. This is three service providers for 22 million people over 1 continent. One of the unnamed service providers located in Adelaide, South Australia, runs a total of 20 ranked dedicated servers (most of which have 64 player slots), which means there is next to no chance of demand getting high enough for Electronic Arts to select more ranked service providers - essentially the service provider has a monopoly.

I live in Western Australia, which is about 2500 kilometers by road from Adelaide. There are several medium size games networks in Western Australia, but none of these hosts the 'Battlefield 2' globally ranked dedicated servers because they have not been selected by Electronics Arts. This poses two problems:
* the connection to the server is unnecessarily delayed and unreliable, and
* you play with random people that you have no knowledge of in the real world.

This is a massive injustice to the online games communities of Australia, and by signing this petition you agree to this, and wish to see more service providers (and not the same ones put more servers online) hosting 'Battlefield 2' Globally Ranked dedicated servers.