Arma Reforger is not one game among many for us. It is the overwhelming majority of the fleet, by a distance nothing else comes close to, and it has been for a long time. That has an obvious consequence: when we build panel tooling, Reforger is what it gets built against first, and what it gets tested on hardest.
This is what that has added up to.
RCON+, a real admin console in the browser
Reforger admin usually means a separate RCON client, a saved connection and a second window. The panel has its own, under Console in the sidebar.
It is live BattlEye RCon with a player roster split into Online and Offline tabs and a search that spans both, so you can act on someone who has already left. Kick and ban are one click with presets. There is a durable unban list that works for offline players, which is the case that usually forces you into a config file. Enabling RCON is one click rather than a manual edit, and connection details for BattleMetrics are on the same page.
Moderation that can actually moderate
The Moderation page is not a read-only log. You can kick, ban with a duration or permanently and a reason attached, and unban, directly. You can ban across every server in your organisation at once, which matters if your community runs more than one box and a problem player simply moves to the next one.
Two or more players on one address are grouped as possible alternate accounts. Residential addresses are highlighted, and shared VPN and proxy exits are listed separately rather than being treated as alts, because a hundred people behind one commercial VPN are not a hundred alts and a tool that says they are is worse than no tool.
Who can open Moderation and see player addresses is its own subuser permission, and it is off by default. That is deliberate. Player addresses are personal data, and handing them to everyone with panel access by default would be the wrong default even if nobody ever misused it.
Chat auto-moderation runs on word and pattern matching with an allowlist, cooldowns and a circuit breaker, and it starts in log-only preview so you can watch what it would have done before it does anything to a real player.
The Mod Manager
Reforger servers live and die by their mod list, so this is where most of the work went.
- Lock every mod to its installed version in one click, and unlock back to Latest just as easily. A mod updating mid-campaign is one of the most common ways a working server stops being one.
- Per-mod update buttons with an honest “checked N days ago” stamp. If we have not looked recently, it says so rather than implying the absence of an update is proof there is not one.
- A dependencies view that flags what is missing and installs it in one click.
- Import by pasting a config or a BattleMetrics link, which is how most people actually arrive with an existing mod list.
- Folders, list and grid views, drag to reorder, and bulk removal, because a real server’s mod list is long enough to need organising.
Server Stats, and why the frame rate moved
The Server Stats page tracks players, CPU, memory, FPS and frame time across the match, and rates each as high, medium or low so you can tell at a glance whether the server is healthy without learning what a good frame time looks like first.
The part that earns its place is the overlay: it lines FPS up against player and AI counts. A dip on its own tells you nothing. A dip that arrives exactly as the AI count climbs tells you the scenario is the problem, not the hardware, and that is a different fix and a different bill.
There is a live kill feed and a K/D leaderboard, and it can post kills to Discord with kill-type and minimum-distance filters, so a knife kill across the map can be announced and a routine one need not be.
Persistence, which used to be a guessing game
Whether your Reforger world is saved between restarts is decided by several settings that lived in different places, and one of them could quietly cancel out the others. A server could look like it had saving switched on and still start a brand new world every time.
It is now one page with one switch, and it says plainly at the top whether your world is actually being saved.
The page shows the save points your server has genuinely written to disk and when the last one was made. Until now there was no way to tell working saving apart from saving that had never once run, because both looked identical from the panel.
It also checks for the reasons saving silently does nothing and explains each one in plain words, including the one nobody finds on their own: a server that restarts more often than its own save interval never stays up long enough to reach a save. If your save interval is ten minutes and your sessions keep ending after four, the page now tells you that, and tells you what to change.
New servers still start with world saving off, which is deliberate. Saving a large world costs performance and most scenarios are meant to start fresh. The difference is that the page now says that is what is happening instead of leaving you to work it out.
Mods that report their own updates
Reforger servers can post their own mod changes to Discord. Point it at a channel and it posts when a mod changes version, is added, or is removed, as one message per change rather than a stream. It stays quiet the first time it runs, so switching it on does not dump your entire mod list into the channel at once.
Where the mod author wrote release notes for the new version, those notes come with the update, so you can tell at a glance whether the change affects you instead of seeing only that a number moved. Around half the mods our servers run publish them, and nothing is invented for the ones that do not.
The Mod Manager has a History tab showing what changed on your server’s mod list and when, with the versions each mod moved between, grouped by day. Each day links across to Insights for that same day, so a mod change can be lined up against a crash or a restart without holding two pages in your head and matching timestamps yourself.
History is recorded for every Reforger server whether or not you have Discord notifications set up. The people who asked for it were the ones not using a chat integration, so making them configure one to get it would have been the wrong way round.
The workshop browser marks a mod as out of date when it was built for an older game version than servers are currently running, so you can see before installing that its author has not updated it in a while. Mods with no version information are left unmarked rather than guessed at.
A console you can read
On a healthy Reforger server the engine’s performance output is almost the entire console. You can now hide it, which is the difference between a wall of frame timings and being able to see what your server is doing. It is on by default and it will never hide an error or a warning.
Scrolling up no longer yanks you back to the bottom while you are reading, which is a small thing that mattered every single time.
The Dump Reader opens again on servers with a large backlog of crashes. It was timing out on exactly the servers that had the most to show, which is the worst possible place to give up. It now reads each log once instead of once per crash, and hands the rest to a background job rather than making you wait.
One more, because it is the honest kind of change: the memory warning on a server running out of RAM now points at what your server actually uses before it suggests buying more, and offers a scheduled restart as the free alternative. More memory is not always the answer and the old wording implied it always was.
The rest of it
The Config Editor is its own sidebar item rather than being buried inside Server Settings, rebuilt as a grouped form with Server, Game, Network and Operating tabs, a search box and a scenario picker. The Dump Reader is a proper page, so a crash is something you read rather than something you guess at.
The crash watchdog is Reforger-specific and has an optional grace delay before it restarts a crashed server, because restarting instantly is the wrong move if the server was about to recover on its own.
The part that is not software
Reforger servers are bound by single-thread speed far more than by core count. Large-scale simulation with a hundred players and a live AI count does not spread itself neatly across a big core count, so a spec sheet full of older high-core-count parts reads well and plays badly. Our fleet is AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D throughout, with DDR5 and NVMe, for that reason and not for the number on the box.
Servers on our filtered locations sit behind Terabit DDoS Protection, 500+ Tbps of volumetric capacity with 13+ Tbps of stateful filtering. A Reforger server with a public browser listing is a visible target, and visible targets get tested.
Try it
Build a Reforger server on the order page, or read the Arma Reforger page for the specifics. Game servers carry a 3-day refund window, so you can put a real mod list on a real box and find out whether the tooling holds up before you commit to it.