BattleAsya
Runs a popular Minecraft server and community in Southeast Asia.
BattleAsya Administration is a non-profit team of college students and volunteers driven by a shared passion for service and creating joy through gaming. We operate BattleAsya, a well-known Minecraft server and community in Southeast Asia.
What began in 2016 as a small project among friends to provide smooth multiplayer for SEA has since grown into one of the region’s most active servers. By 2021, we saw rapid growth, reaching over 800 concurrent players at peak hours and serving a community of more than 5,000 members.
Gamemodes
OP-Survival - Economy
OP-Skyblock - Economy
Towny SMP - Economy
BedWars - Arcade
SkyWars - Arcade
EggWars - Arcade
Soup KitPvP - Arcade
MLG Rush - Arcade
PracticePvP - Arcade
Survival Games - Arcade
Ultra Hardcore (UHC) - Arcade
Responsibilities
As Owner, I handle all aspects of the game service and community.
Public Relations: foster positive engagement with the community and promote BattleAsya as a professional, community-first brand
Marketing & Sales: oversee ad campaigns to grow the player base and webstore to sustain the operation.
Human Resources: define roles, permissions, and policies to support a distributed team and maintain a healthy work culture
Backend Infrastructure: contribute to proxies, databases, firewalls, DNS, load balancers, and file systems to ensure stability and scale
Game System: design and maintain systems integrations, configurations, ranks and permissions, economy balancing, and anti‑cheat and exploit protections
Game Content: collaborate on quests, minigames, game modes, plugins, and events to keep gameplay fresh and rewarding
Community Administration: draft rules and guide moderation to sustain public order and fair gameplay
Community Engagement: run surveys, join discussions, and consult representatives
Support: handle tickets and issue resolution
Treasury: oversee budgeting and spend control
Art: coordinate creative assets like banners, posters, and logos
Highlights & Impacts
Built a thriving Discord community of 5,000 and a Facebook group of 3,000, anchored by consistent engagement and responsive support.
Peak player counts grew 400% in 2021, from 200 in January to 1,000 in October, with over 800 playing concurrently at peak hours.
Maintained 99.5% uptime over 6 years through careful infrastructure management and continuous monitoring.
Led a team of 20+ volunteers across time zones, setting development strategy and management guidelines that enabled steady delivery and collaboration.
Mitigated 10Gbps DoS with rate limiting, load balancing, reverse proxies, and L7 filtering, preserving service quality during high-pressure incidents.
Recognised as one of the most popular Minecraft servers and communities in SEA, thanks to a relentless focus on player experience, reliability, and community-driven development.
Medias
Videos and images showcasing BattleAsya’s peak with vibrant player base and creative content.
Peak
Activites
Public Buildings
Operations
Switch tabs to review the documents.
See how our anti‑cheat and staff respond to in‑game cheating.
Infrastructure
Choice of Hosting
Minecraft performance depends more on single-core speed than on high core counts because the game’s core operations are largely single-threaded. With a strong CPU, the server can rely on frequent, smooth garbage collection, reducing the need for large RAM allocations.
In the mid-2010s, affordable options in Asia were mostly shared hosts that priced by RAM. You had no control over single-core performance or core count, and many providers oversold their nodes, causing lag even with high RAM. OVH later offered affordable dedicated servers in Asia, but traffic was metered after a threshold and the machines favored high clock speeds with low core counts (or the other way round). For large servers, this meant buying multiple machines and paying traffic overages, which wasn’t ideal.
BattleAsya’s large player base generates about 2 TB of traffic per month. To support 800–1,000 concurrent players, we scale horizontally across multiple servers to exploit single-core performance. This requires unmetered bandwidth, strong single-core performance, and a sufficiently high core count to run many instances in parallel.
We partnered with Leang for a private Malaysian bare-metal host: a Ryzen 9 3950X (16 cores/32 threads) at 4.5 GHz with 100+ GB RAM and unmetered network traffic. This setup fits BattleAsya’s performance and bandwidth needs and underpins our current infrastructure.
System Architecture
Secure LAN: All backend components (including database) run on the same LAN for low-latency access. Only BungeeCord is exposed externally; all other servers are internal-only. All traffic from BungeeCord to internal servers is encrypted via public/private key pairs to prevent inner network bypass.
BungeeCord Gateway: Acts as a reverse proxy to present multiple Minecraft servers as one. We use a custom high‑performance handler that efficiently processes traffic and blocks L7 attacks without disrupting active sessions. Proven capacity: 1,000 concurrent players with no performance drop.
Hardware: All servers are containerized on a single bare‑metal host:
Ryzen 9 3950X (16C/32T) @ 4.5 GHz, 100 GB RAM, 1 Gbps commercial fiber.
Highly optimized, multithreaded software stack.
Capacity (steady, good performance):
Economy: 50–80 players/server
Arcades: 100-120 players/server
Bedwars: 200–250 players/server
Reverse Proxy Shield: Backend is hidden behind a pool of external reverse proxies (industry providers with strong anti‑DDoS). Our custom proxy software forwards traffic while preserving source IP. Each proxy supports ~200 players without degradation.
L3/L4 (e.g., SYN floods): Stopped at reverse proxies.
L7 (e.g., bot/quick-join attacks): Stopped at BungeeCord.
Anycast-Style Regional Routing: Proxies span 4 major SEA ISPs. We dynamically shift player traffic across providers to avoid bad routes. For ISPs with poor paths to Malaysia, we route via Singapore first to reduce latency and improve connection stability.
DNS Load Balancing: play.battleasya.com distributes across 7 proxies with even load and smart failover. If a proxy goes down, only ~1/7 players are impacted; LB stops sending new sessions there and reassigns affected players. my.battleasya.com and sg.battleasya.com use separate, dedicated pools.
Authentication: New connections go to the auth server (login), then to the lobby. Auth server has no server-switch capability, eliminating login bypass vectors. BungeeCord enforces login verification to prevent any bypass attempts.
People Management
We grow the volunteer team as the community expands. Candidates are chosen on merit based on daily in-game behavior. Suitable players are invited, placed on probation, and mentored by a recommending senior. After demonstrating fit, they’re promoted to regular staff.
We’re a non-profit — all webstore revenue funds operations, so all staff, including me, are unpaid. Without monetary incentives, we have to rely on strong culture and clear processes to maintain accountability and standards:
Select for loving, friendly, service-oriented, and respectful individuals.
Maintain a clear hierarchy and promotion paths to reward contribution.
Enforce least-privilege permissions to reduce abuse risk.
Foster a supportive culture with open discussion, active text/voice, high tolerance for mistakes, guidance over blame.
Encourage ownership so staff lead their initiatives with full support.
Recognize excellence with occasional personal rewards (e.g., Steam gift cards).
As a result, a strong team forms where genuine friendships develop — many play other games together and some meet offline.
We run an anti-corruption process for clear breaches of trust. Repeat offenders are removed. Issues are rare due to strong screening during probation and vigilant senior oversight — most investigations are proposed by senior staff and resolved collectively.
I’m proud we’ve built a reliable, motivated team without financial ties.
Apply for Permissions
A senior staff account was hijacked and used to run destructive commands, damaging builds and player progress. We rolled back, upgraded authentication, closed bypasses, enabled 2FA for all staff, and enforced strict least‑privilege permissions. Despite these fixes, the incident still exposed residual security gaps that required additional controls.
Senior staff sometimes need elevated actions (e.g., region bypass, world edit for public builds, economy tools for scam/laundering cases). To manage this safely, we introduced AFP:
Staff must enter a password and reason to temporarily unlock high-risk commands.
Permissions must be returned when no longer needed; as a fail-safe, they’re auto-revoked on disconnect.
This adds a verification step and prompts staff to reconsider necessity before using powerful commands.
Incident Response
OVH Global Outage
On October 13, 2021, OVH experienced a major global outage caused by human error during planned network maintenance, disrupting its backbone and affecting customers worldwide, including Singapore. Because many Minecraft servers in Asia run on OVH Singapore, a large number went down during normal service hours, driving an influx of players to BattleAsya.
See "Network Incident" for details of this global outage.
While our backend is hosted outside OVH, four OVH-based proxies were impacted and automatically removed from the load balancer pools by our failover system. Traffic seamlessly shifted to the remaining three proxies, keeping the network reachable.
Recognizing the surge as both a challenge and an opportunity, we quickly allocated more moderators for in‑game support and rules enforcement, and expanded server capacity to accommodate the increased load. We also organized community events to lift morale and sustain engagement during the disruption.
During the incident, BattleAsya surpassed 1,000 concurrent players for the first time, with BedWars alone successfully hosting over 200 players per server. The sustained performance under exceptional traffic validated our infrastructure’s optimization and distributed design, demonstrating stable service delivery, effective failover, and the ability to scale quickly under pressure.
High Ping Event
The internet is constantly changing — especially across Asia, where network infrastructure varies widely by country. Players sometimes encounter connectivity issues due to flawed routing or peering between their ISP and OVH Singapore, resulting in unplayable latency.
To stay ahead of these incidents, our network team monitors OVH smokeping charts for major ISPs across Southeast Asia, identifies problematic paths, and advises players on the best proxy to use at any given time.
Our highly distributed infrastructure gives players real choices. If their route to OVH Singapore is degraded, they can connect through AWS Singapore or our Malaysian proxies instead. In many cases, simply switching proxies resolves the issue immediately.
This flexibility sets us apart from regional servers that rely exclusively on OVH. By designing for resilience and multi‑provider connectivity, we maintain a consistent gameplay experience even when the broader network is unstable.
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