This won't be specific to BF3, but I feel like it's good general advice for this class of problem.
I spent months trying to figure out something similar for TF2, and I had a whole team of really smart people advising me, along with a really powerful scripting engine that could mold the game in whatever way I chose. I spent weeks going over gameplay statistics and soliciting opinions from the clan's members. I incorporated just about every idea, thought, data point, and everything else in at least a dozen different iterations of scripts. I tried random rebalancing, skill-based rebalancing, different weights, different times of the game... They all failed.
What I eventually learned was the following:
- Some people play to win. They are going to get angry and quit if they lose repeatedly.
- Some people play to hang out with friends. They are going to get angry and quit if you move their teams around on them.
You can't please both groups of people at the same time. Good people who play together and coordinate are going to steamroll. If you break them up, they'll either start losing (which angers the first group) or not be able to play with their friends (which angers the second group). If admins are going in and mucking about, they'll be the target of this anger more often than not.
If your concern is keeping the server full, make it social. People stick around when there's community, when frequently you're playing with and against interesting people. Try to make friends with another clan and invite them to play when you guys play. Then you can round out the teams with random players. That will help balance the teams while still letting people play with their friends. Plus, crushing non-organized players can get boring after a while.
Finally, consider if you're willing to break up your squads to different teams in the interests of keeping the game balanced and fun for more people. In our organization, it was pretty much a requirement that if the other team was quitting, and there was a leader on the "winning" team, he or she had to switch teams. It was part of the responsibility of being a leader to ensure the livelihood of the server.
Best Answer
I had the same crash and I found that turning off NVIDIA HairWorks and putting your game in full-screen mode resolved the problem for me.