After a few weeks of unstable online gameplay, disconnects and server shut downs, EA has finally completed Bad Company 2 server maintenance, according to a Tweet from the official BC2 Twitter account. However, the official Battlefield blog states that some players may still experience stats issues, where stats of over the last few days are not updated accordingly.
EA says that from now on, online gameplay will be stable and ready to “serve your BC2 needs”. We sure hope so, as many gamers, including us, have been frustrated due to the lack of stability on the online front.
We previously reported that EA/DICE won’t be offering a public stats feed for Bad Company 2, but now it seems that the site bfbcs.com has obtained some form of a feed, and they’re offering stats for all players, including consoles as well.
BFBCS.com states that they’ll be offering an API for others to use, but we don’t know the reliability of such feed — neither do we know whether DICE will allow third party stats site like they used to do. For now though, it’s great that BC2 players have a place online to check their stats, ranks and leaderboards.
DICE is still having problems with the servers and serverload — if you’ve played BC2, you’d know that by now. DICE was recently rumored to have asked server providers to shut down idle servers because they stressed the network and EA master server too much. DICE has now clarified that they only asked Multiplay.co.uk, one of the largest game server providers in the world. DICE said,
We did not make this decision lightly but as an attempt to temporarily lower traffic on EA servers that is caused by the game server browser while we work on a client fix for the browser here at DICE. After previously shutting down all EA Public servers which accounted for approximately 40,000 player slots we have actually gained approximately 50,000 more player slots from new rental servers. We currently have enough server capacity to allow over 150,000 players to get in a game server at once and that is just on PC.
You can read DICE full statement and explanation here.
On the same day that Modern Warfare 2 is set to receive a map pack DLC, DICE has announced that Bad Company 2 will be receiving a “VIP map pack 2″ on the same day. Or actually, it’s not really a map pack, since both maps are already available, instead, the Conquest mode will be added to the map Africa Harbor and a Rush mode to the map Laguna Presa.
The “map pack” will be released for free to all who bought the game at retail, those who purchased it used will have to pay.
After Valve announced Steam for Mac, there have been rumors flying around about other publisher bringing their games to Apple’s Mac platform, among them, Bad Company 2.
According to DICE producer Karl Magnus Troedsson, who Twittered that they’re “currently investigating the possibility of making BFBC2 available on Mac.”.
DICE and EA have released two Battlefield titles on Steam, and one title on the Mac platform a few years ago: Battlefield 2142, which wasn’t met with huge success. But then again, neither was the PC version.
Bad Company 2 has been having server issues on all three platforms recently, either due to the sheer popularity of the game or DICE not being ready for so many players. The Xbox 360 multiplayer experience in particular was troublesome, and PC and PS3 users experience random disconnects as well. Either way, they’ve done some updates to the servers, here are DICE’s comments:
X360 was severely impacted, and the service is being restarted. It should be back online and we are monitoring closely.
PC had an outage, but the service is offline currently and the service is being restarted. It should be back online and we are monitoring closely. We will then start checking the quality of the customer experience to determine possible next steps.
PS3 appeared to have a brief outage, but has quickly recovered and the services is functioning properly at this time.
DICE reports that peak traffic was over 400% more than other Battlefield games, which can explain the unstable servers.
Bad Company 2 has now officially been released in Europe as well, and as you can see above, EA spent a few days ahead trying to promote the game, this time with two marketers dressed as soldiers, strapped on with a games console and a projector.
The biggest criticism seems to be the single player campaign, which tries too much to emulate Modern Warfare, is too short, and features a tame plot and story. The multiplayer however, certainly lives up to the Battlefield standard.
While DICE has released the official tools for admins and server owners of Bad Company 2 game servers (PC only), there are now other tools on the market as well. The new Admin Tool offers pretty much the same features (+ a few more), including:
Banlist sharing between selected servers
Auto-kick teamkillers
Ingame commands
Ip/guid log
(i)Phone support
More detailed Access flags
webversion
Retrieve PB screenshots (still checking if this is possible)
Autopatch BFBC2admin client and daemon
API (both in C++ as well as a Scripting option) to extend our client/daemon
The team plans to add even iPhone support in future updates. Server owners can download the tool for free at bfbc2admin.com.
We’ll update the list with more as soon as more reviews are published. So far, it’s looking really good for the game and we’ve yet to come across a negative review.
We previously 
DICE is still having problems with the servers and serverload — if you’ve played BC2, you’d know that by now. DICE was recently rumored to have asked server providers to shut down idle servers because they stressed the network and EA master server too much. DICE has now clarified that they only asked Multiplay.co.uk, one of the largest game server providers in the world. DICE said,
After Valve announced Steam for Mac, there have been rumors flying around about other publisher bringing their games to Apple’s Mac platform, among them, Bad Company 2. 
While DICE has released the official tools for admins and server owners of Bad Company 2 game servers (PC only), there are now other tools on the market as well. The new Admin Tool offers pretty much the same features (+ a few more), including:
Bad Company 2 is out and so are the reviews, and so far, they’re almost all quite positive about the game.