Renting a Mass Effect: Andromeda Server

I used to admin BF2, BF3 and BF4 servers. Assuming BF1 is similar, here are the advantages:

• Control over map rotation - Online FPS game have maps, some are better than others. If you admin the server, you control the rotation.
• Similarly, control over map modes (Team Deathmatch vs. Capture the Flag, for example)
• Ban hammer. Online games have cheaters and hackers, it's inevitable. Being an admin gives you and your friends a ban hammer for cheaters.
• Customization - I used to run a custom server for "Zombie mode", which is pretty much what it sounds like, 1 to 4 players against 16+ "zombies" armed only with knives
• Prestige - making onto the leaderboard for popular servers has a number of benefits. You get interviewed by gamer mags, you can advertise for $$, you can charge $$$ for priveleged access (instead of waiting an hour in a join queue), etc.

Separately, EA monopolizing the server rental business is very bad news for the third-party hosters I've worked with. EA has been slowly moving in this direction, putting more and more restrictions on third-party hosters. We all saw this coming, but it is still sad. There goes competition.

Wasn't Bioware on the road that "people can host their games with a outdated 90s/early 2000 system"?

You're assuming that ME:A will have actual servers instead of the peer to peer BS we're used to (ME3 DA:I). I want to be that optimistic, but honestly we don't really know how the system will be.

And even if servers will replace the P2P system, they wont add some rent-a-server thing. I doubt people will see that as a good thing with the game having microtransactions and everything; and ME is not nearly as popular in the MP department as a game like BF or other dedicated MP games out there.

Well, hopefully it'll have something better than the BS that we're stuck with now. Let me tell you of me and another person's experience with these two games.

I can't join the other person's ME3MP game. It tells me that I don't have the correct DLC's installed. The other person can join mine, and we both have zero clue why this is. In DA:I, we can't join each other if we invite one another. It tells us both that we don't have the correct DLC's installed.

Have great fun in ME3MP, but man. I sure as shit hope they clean some of this mess up.

Totally standard with DICE. New FPS MP releases are unplayable for at least a month after release, with so many bugs and crashes. It was 3-4 months for BF3.
$300/year is not steep, that's unbelievably cheap. I'd have to see the server stats and config options to really compare, but we easily spent that much in less than 3 months, although that was for a pair of servers. If you get about 20+ regulars to chip in $5/month, it's manageable.

EDIT: I just looked at current prices. They've come down, which is interesting, since demand has gone down -- prices should have gone up. About $1300/year for the package we used to have, with 2 servers. The more modern 24 player Hardline servers are only $370/year, comparable to EA BF1's.

I don't think you realize how popular ME3MP was and continues to be.

Agreed and if you had more control over things and the ability to mod some things some private servers would be in play for sure.