Promo art from Battlefield 2042 — Image: Battlefield 2042

So the new Battlefield has this mode called Portal that’s like a great big sandbox, where players can customise games to basically be whatever the hell they want. And at the moment, because we live in the world we live in, a lot of those games are XP farms.

Yes, as shocked as you might be to read this, a lot of players are forsaking using their imaginations in favour of building custom games where they can just cruise around slaughtering bots and earning loads of XP, which allows them to level up faster and thus unlock better gear faster. Some of the most shameless examples of this don’t even arm the bots with firearms, they just send them out onto the battlefield with knives to meet a swift death.

Which, fine, whatever. XP farming is nothing new. What makes this particular example of XP farming fantastic is that because of the way that Battlefield 2042 populates its matches with bots, there are actual humans who are searching for stuff like “XP farm” in server lists and winding up joining in these games.

But not as the XP farmers. As the XP. PC Gamer’s Tyler Wilde spent the weekend messing around in these servers and found loads of people “joining XP farming servers only to discover that they’re the crops”, entering games with nothing but a knife, alongside scores of bots, and wondering why a tiny team of human players armed to the teeth are just ploughing through them.

Even better:

What’s really funny is that not everyone leaves after discovering that only a handful of players in the server are XP farming and they aren’t one of them. I’ve stuck around and watched players desperately run at their tormentors with knives over and over. Somewhere along the line, a rumor must’ve started that typing “/switch” or “/swapteam” into chat puts you on the other team, because there’s a lot of that. It does not work. I’ve also seen strings of players type “/gun,” apparently hoping that the command will give them a gun. It does not.

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Please read the whole thing here, it’s very, very funny. In response, DICE made a complimentary set of changes that not only “impacts the effectiveness of XP Farming Servers”, but also works to “free up more servers for Portal”, so that there are less XP farms and more unique and interesting ways to play the game.