Arma 3 and Battleye (Again)

[Barney_Mattox]

I understand this topic has been answered as recently as April 2nd (link). So this is probably more of a new AMP user giving feedback.

In the Arma 3 Generic profile documentation it suggests that Battleye is optional.

@Greelan

At least the first three ports need to be port forwarded (if you’re on a NAT network). Also forward the BattlEye port if using BattlEye on the server.

From the April 2nd response its indicated that Battleye is required for AMP to operate correctly. However, this seemed odd given that Arma 3 is now using a generic profile and battleye isn’t required for any other hosted servers to work (that I’m aware of). I’ve also never been required to run battleye in any other hosted or self-hosted environment with Arma 3, which suggests this is an active choice that the AMP team has made to require Battleye as opposed to an Arma 3 enforced requirement. It might help to understand what AMP features require Battleye and if there are any options to degrade AMP slightly in favor of running a clean server.

I’m not generally opposed to battleye, but for our group that’s been playing together for 8+ years it’s just a nuisance. It has been a constant source of connectivity issues, headless server faults, and random “ghost” kicks as we use heavily modded environments and SIM rigs. And most recently, the ability to play Arma 3 on Mac Silicon has been a game changer for when we’re traveling and want to play from our laptops. However, this requires Battleye to be disabled (per Bohemia Interactive’s instructions).

Disabling Battleye has universally solved all of these issues over the years. And in the event of an actual server client mismatch, there are numerous other mechanisms and error states in Arma 3 to validate and correct these issues without the need for Battleye (or troubleshooting around it).

It’s certainly feasible to continue running our own dedicated servers or to fall back to other hosted environments, but I see no reason why this shouldn’t be possible under AMP.

So as a New AMP user and admittedly very green with the inner workings of this hosting environment, I’m just pushing on this detail a bit more to understand why this is a limitation/requirement for AMP and if there may be any options now or in the future to work around this issue through an alternate hosting profile or degrading/replacing AMP functionality that is specific to this requirement.

[Mike]

The reason that battleye is mandatory is a technical one. For some daft reason, the games developers made the games RCON part of Battleye. So servers that run without it can’t be managed except in-game. So AMP consequently depends on it to manage, monitor and control the server. Basically it needs it to do it’s Job at all.

The solution would be pressure on the game developers to fix this underlying issue.