Conflict vs Game Master: two very different servers

Arma Reforger ships two modes with almost nothing in common, and plenty of servers fail by trying to be both at once.

Conflict: the match that runs itself

Conflict is objective-based: two sides, positions to capture, material progression. It has one decisive property for a public server — it works with nobody at the wheel. A player connecting at three in the morning finds a match already in progress.

It is the mode to pick for an open server that wants to fill, and it is also the more demanding one on hardware: large engagements load the CPU and the network hard.

Game Master: the match somebody runs

Game Master is a live staging tool: one person builds the situation in real time, places units, triggers events. It is extraordinary for organised milsim and unusable without someone running it.

The practical consequence is simple: a Game Master server lives at the pace of its game masters. If nobody is there, there is nothing to play. It suits a community that schedules sessions, not a server you leave open.

Sizing for each

• Conflict needs headroom for peaks. The server suffers during big fights, not on average.
• Game Master is more predictable but can spike hard when a game master spawns a lot of AI at once.

Either way, leave margin: Enfusion does not degrade gradually, it drops.

Should you run both

Technically, switching scenario means editing the configuration and restarting. It is not a hot swap. A community that genuinely wants both usually runs two instances, which costs more but avoids interrupting a Conflict match to start a hosted session.

Which one fills a server

If the goal is a server that grows on its own, Conflict wins without much debate. It rewards players who show up alone, at any hour, with no coordination — and that is how almost every public Arma server recruits. Game Master builds something a public server cannot: sessions people remember and talk about afterwards. The usual path is to open with Conflict, let a regular crowd form, and add scheduled Game Master nights once there are enough regulars to fill them.

Our Arma Reforger hosting plans have no commitment, which makes it easy to try both modes before deciding which one deserves a dedicated instance.