A new Battlefield: Bad Company 2 server build (R21) has been rolling out since last Friday. This update does not apply to clients. If you own a server, contact your server provider to see if your server has been updated.

Since Friday evening, servers are gradually being upgraded to R21.

It was developed in response to some RSPs reporting that players would spam in the text chat, and that would cause stuttering for other players.

• There is a spam filter for text-chat: if someone sends 5 messages in 10 seconds, that player is muted for 60 seconds
• Text chat can be muted across the entire server
• Individual players can be promoted to “admin” (cannot be muted, spam filter does not apply) and “muted” (never allowed to text chat)
• All settings configurable via remote admin interface
• New textfile on-disk: textchatmoderationlist.txt [list of which players are admin & muted]
• Updated docs; available here
  

Engine overhaul means everyone’s happy

Battlefield 3, long rumored, is finally on its way. We always assumed DICE was secretly tinkering with this while making the Battlefield Bad Company series, and while there’s been off-the-cuff remarks from ex-DICE personnel, EA itself hasn’t formally acknowledged the game until last week’s announcement of the BF3 beta being bundled with the limited edition of Medal of Honor. But that’s all that’s been said about it — so we’re still pretty much in the dark as to what we’ll get with Battlefield 3.

All we know is that BF3 seems to be a multi-platform release (by virtue of being bundled with Medal of Honor), so it will not only be on PC, but also on PS3 and 360. That, and it’s likely to use the Frostbite 2.0 engine (as good as Bad Company 2 was, it was still technically Frostbite one-point-something). Basically, we want the aesthetics and destruction of BC2 with the scope and scale of BF2. At the moment, we’re going to roll with a near-future setting; even though BC2 does a pretty good job with the modern-to-future gear, we’d like those aesthetics to be brought into a deeper and more interesting game in BF3. Anyhow, here are some more of our humble suggestions to DICE.

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EA sent out a press release announcing that people who order the Medal of Honor Limited Edition will receive beta access to the Battlefield 3. Yes you read that right, Battlefield 3.

No details about the actual game are offered (or even a logo) other than the beta could start up to 12 months after Medal of Honor releases. The small amount of info also says that Xbox Gold is required for Xbox users so it looks like Battlefield 3 will be a multi platform game.

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