After it was discovered last week that the number of "official" DICE and EA Battlefield 3 servers on console had dropped significantly in the wake of a new rental scheme, the developer has moved to bring a large number of them back.

We were told last week that no servers had gone offline; instead, DICE's own had been rented out to fans, who were customising game styles to their own whims. Sadly, that didn't appeal to the large numbers of people who wanted to play a "normal" game of Battlefield 3, so the developer has brought a ton of them back into the fold.

"You should see DICE-hosted servers up today", EA told VentureBeat. "I do not have the exact percentage or number of servers, but we'll continue to monitor this to make sure all players are having the best possible gameplay experience."

A search on PS3 turned up over 170 servers alone, all across the planet, so yeah, they're back.

EA returns official DICE servers to Battlefield 3 [VentureBeat]