Kalms

So -- those of you who were discussing whether or not to close down your BF3 servers, has any of you made the decision to close them down yet? If yes, what were the primary reasons?

Regarding that blog post, I'll just link to Repi's response. Now. Some prioritization lists from the other side of the fence... Game development and hardware --- if I get to choose: 1) make it playable on most machines out there 2) make it really awesome on machines with badass hardware There is (or will be) a minspec for the game. The minspec is to be printed on the game's box. Manufacturing of boxes has long lead times (let's say ~1 month). Game development and drivers -- if I get to choose: 1) make it work properly on the very-latest drivers 2) detect old drivers, and turn off stuff that doesn't work there 3) develop workarounds which makes all the newfangled stuff work on old drivers as well Option 1 is easy for games that do tested-and-true stuff. BF3 pushes the envelope and therefore requires quite an effort, both from us and from the HW/driver people. You most likely will need the latest drivers (at launch day) if you want all the bells & whistles. One of the guiding principles is that a game should never crash. It may run with features disabled, or refuse to run (and explain why) but it should never crash. Crashes are bad because the user is then unable to play the game AND the user doesn't get any information as to why he/she is unable to play the game.

Suitable postal address: Attn: BF3 game team Digital Illusions CE AB P.O Box 20068 104 60 Stockholm Sweden

To the best of my knowledge, name hacks which try to fool the game server & other game clients are not possible in BFBC2. EA's master servers inform the game server of both the EA account ID and soldier name of any joining player. Both the PunkBuster GUID and the EA GUID in BFBC2 is based off the EA account ID. So one EA account = one PB GUID + one EA GUID. The GUIDs are not dependent on which soldier is chosen.

No, it would not. The game infrastructure is not zero-maintenance. The stability of BFBC2 is benefited by the command-and-control structure of the strictly-RSP program. I will not go into further detail.

*crosses fingers*

As some sort of counterweight to all the negativity displayed in this thread: DICE is committed to getting PB to function properly in MOH. You will see at least one server update specifically to address the current issues with servers that randomly stop streaming.

Client R9 will only see Server R24 or newer (because the network protocol has changed). Before blaming EA, please ensure that your GSP has upgraded your server to R24. At the time of writing, approximately 60% of servers are upgraded.

We requested that the limiter only be available for unranked servers.

Noted.

EA Online primer: * a user has a master account * online access to BFBC2 PC is tied to the master account * a user can create one or more personas (aka "soldier names") * personas must be unique -> player A can not impersonate player B, due to the persona creation process -> player A can however easily create more personas -> banning on persona is ineffective -> banning on IP is quite effective -> banning on master account is very effective We're looking into it.