Naughty player subsequently punished.

DICE has found itself embroiled within a bit of a Battlefield 3 faux pax as it was discovered one of its Battlelog moderators was a hacker.

The unofficial Battlefield Blog reports that the player - who went by the alias 'MrPropper777' - had been promoted to a community moderator by DICE, and was given privileges such as the ability to delete other users' posts.

The player has since had his privileges removed, and his stats wiped.

DICE released a server side update today (R17) for Battlefield 3, which fixes several cheat exploits allowing hackers to mass kill players. A post on the Battlefield Blog states they have banned a batch of several hundred confirmed cheaters recently and will continue to hunt down cheaters. DICE reminds players that you can go to a suspected cheaters profile on Battlelog and click the report button marked by a triangle with an exclamation mark.


In our continued effort to minimize cheating in Battlefield 3, we recently banned another batch of several hundred confirmed cheaters based on your reports and our player behavior data.

At DICE, we will never tolerate cheaters. Life on the battlefield can be harsh, especially when you’re up against the fantastic flying duo. But it should never be a case of you losing because someone is outright cheating.

We have always taken cheating seriously. Starting today, we will further intensify our efforts to hunt down and rid Battlefield 3 of cheaters. Stats wiping and banning this disruptive minority is the only way they will understand that they are ruining the game for others. We do this for the millions of dedicated players out there who deserve a fair game, every game.

If you believe you have been the victim of outright cheating, the best way to report your concerns is to go to Battlelog, enter the profile page of the person you suspect and click the triangle in the top right corner of his name.

This will open up a window where you can describe to us at DICE what happened. Please enter as much detail as possible, describing what specifically makes you believe this player has used unfair methods, and preferably include a link to the Battle Report for the match in question.

These reports are then received by our analysts here at DICE who will do a deeper analysis of the situation and take appropriate action, including stats wiping and/or banning players who are confirmed as cheating.

Reducing the number of cheaters is an ongoing endeavor, and one that we will never stop. Thanks for your co-operation, and see you on the battlefield!

Today (Tue Nov 22nd, 2011) we have updated most components of BF3 PC:

* We have released an update to the BF3 PC game client via Origin. It is ~500MB large. Everyone will be prompted to install the update.
* We have updated the master servers - mainly stability fixes.
* We have updated Battlelog - see the blog post for details.
* We have sent out a new game server build to all PC RSPs.

The new server is R9, build ID 886605.
Manual here: http://static.cdn.ea.com/dice/u/f/bfbc2/tmp/BF3_PC_Server_R9_886605_Docs_ServerAdministrator_v2.zip [static.cdn.ea.com]

Battlelog will only show Server R9 or newer. This is because the new game client is no longer compatible with the older game servers. The RSPs are gradually updating their servers. As they complete the update you will see more and more servers in the browser.

Here is a near-complete changelist for the game servers:

* Support for unranked servers (vars.ranked)
* Ranked servers have a few settings as read-only (see documentation)
* Unranked servers allow changing of all settings
* Reintroduced vars.allUnlocksUnlocked for unranked servers
* The game server will parse all of Startup.txt even if an error is encountered
* vars.roundStartPlayerCount / vars.roundRestartPlayerCount handling rewritten to be more natural
* vars.maxPlayers cannot be used to go past the server's max number of slots any more
* Security updates to the game server
* Fixed several server crashes, hangs, and a 10-second stall - all of which which would make the server drop every player
* vars.gamePassword can only be invoked during server startup, not while the server is already running
* vars.teamKillCountForKick 0 will disable team kicking instead of kicking people frivolously
* banList.add would sometimes crash; fixed now
* EOD bot scoring exploit fix

If you are a server administrator that run ranked servers, then you should take note that a few settings are no longer changeable for ranked servers.
The most notable example here is that you are no longer able to set the min # of players to start a round to less than 4. This is to prevent statspadding.
Secondly, the idle timeout mechanism is always on, and set at 300 seconds on ranked servers. This is to prevent people idling for long swathes of time on ranked servers. Having idle kick at 5 minutes is harsh, and we will revisit the max timeout for Server R10 - however, we do not plan to allow for turning of the idle kick altogether.

If you are a server administrator that run unranked servers, notice that you should set the server to unranked by having a 'vars.ranked false' at the top of your Startup.txt. You must set it to unranked during the server startup; once the server is present on Battlelog, it can no longer be switched between ranked and unranked status. Once it is set to unranked, all other settings can be controlled. And yes, the setting for unlocking all weapons & gadgets (vars.allUnlocksUnlocked) is back.