We are sending out new servers to our providers called "R5". They will be testing them out and changing over the servers by tomorrow evening. This server contains some fixes for the "Connection to the server has been lost" message that a lot of you will have seen.

We are also working on making another new server over the weekend as EA has set up some dedicated front-end boxes just for Battlefield Bad Company 2 which we will update the server to use and should work to improve the stability of connections to EA for everyone.

At around 15:30 (GMT) today, we will be rolling out the latest server update (R7) from DICE. This is an automated process and will take approximately 1 hour to complete.

Update R7 Changelist:

- Several common crash fixes. Especially those which have monitoring scripts that rely on the Remote Admin interface should see stability improvements.

- PunkBuster can send commands to Remote Admin interface (so 'pb_sv_task 0 -1 <stuff to send to admin interface>' works)

- Veteran-rank handling corrected (it was broken in R6 and possibly earlier)

- Switched back to Release version of the low-level networking library; less debug output but higher performance

- Increased the initial server reconnection interval to 30+rand(30) seconds

- PB GUID generation is now based on EA account IDs (it used to be based on persona names)

from: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
date: Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 6:49 AM
subject: BC2: R8 Server Update
signed-by: killercreation.co.uk

Hi there,

From 07:00 (GMT) this morning, we will be rolling out DICE's latest R8 server update. This will take approximately 1 hour to complete and all servers should be updated by 08:00.

R8 Change list:

- Workaround for the "player manages to join server twice" crash. Now the server detects this and refuses the player entry. Client might hang but it will not take down the server as well.

- Workaround for the "cannot join player to any team" crash. Teams might get uneven, most notably SQDM sessions with 5v3 players, but the server should no longer crash.

- Game sends PB output to pbucon (so pb webtool can be used to run PB commands and see their results)

Kind regards

KC Staff

Below is the changelog for server update R9. No ETA as yet, and with it being Easter, it'll most likely be nearer the end of next week.


1) admin.say command implemented
- the output currently looks a bit funky on the game client, like so: Player: [Server]: <text>
but with the next game client it will look like: Server: <text>


2) admin.yell to squad has changed (you need to specify both team and squad)

3) squad numbering has changed - the "no squad" squad has ID 0, and real squads are 1 and up.

4) Autobalance improved, it shuffles people both during and between rounds now, and does a better job. No way to turn it off via admin interface yet I think.

5) mapList* commands reworked

6) banList* commands reworked

7) listPlayers command added

admin.listPlayers command reworked (GUID, kills, deaths, ping and score added)

9) Players have non-PB GUIDs now (these are distinct from PB GUIDs)

10) onChat event reworked
- now it specifies target player subset as well
- shows text before profanity filtering
- client-originated chat messages starting with "/" make it to the server, and broadcast via onChat, but are not broadcast to other game clients
- use "/!<command>" if you want to be able to send commands to your homemade rcon tools without showing the commands to other players

11) player.onAuthenticated added (it's triggered when a player receives GUID)

12) player.onSquadChange, player.onTeamChange implemented

13) Couple of crash fixes

14) Support for "region" setting

We have just sent out servers labelled R9 to the server providers.
Our initial plan of forcing PB to be ON when ranked mode is enabled has been delayed until R10. This is to allow us to gather some extra information from Punkbuster enabled servers to ensure all PB related issues are gone before we switch to PB ON = Ranked.

The other changes are as follows: