NitefallBrigade™

Tomorrow, 12th March, and Saturday, 13th March at 8:00GMT/9:00 CET:12:00 (midnight) PST, EA will take the servers down, this time we will come up with even more hardware with more capacity to handle all the BFBC2 traffic. Once the maintenance is complete you will experience an improvement to your online experience.

This will be extended maintenance to allow the new hardware to be installed and affect all three platforms (PC, PS3 and Xbox 360).

Maintenance on Friday 12th will last for 4 hours – 8:00 GMT to 12:00 midday GMT/9:00 CET to 13:00 CET/12:00 midnight PST to 4:00 PST.

Since launch a week ago, BFBC2 has already put EA servers through the following stress:

* The 4 different soldier types have gathered a score of more than 34 Billion.
* There’s been more than 400M kills made.
* 1.3M roadkills
* Squads and Teams have assisted each other to 6.2 Billion points.

Now we are adding more capacity to let you smash those numbers multiple times over in the weeks to come.

Source…

While the core of the dev team here at DICE as well as all the back-end teams at EA are 110% focused on stabilizing the game experience we do have some other, great news to reveal. Today we’re happy to announce the release date of the second VIP map package for Battlefield: Bad Company 2! It will be made available on the 30th of March on all platforms at no extra cost to all of you who’ve got your VIP codes entered in the game. VIP Map Pack 2 contains the following:

Arica Harbor Conquest mode – US Command launches a break through action directly at the Russian base. Collateral damage is of no consequence. Capture and secure tactical positions in Conquest Mode across the vast Arica Harbor map.

Laguna Presa Rush mode – The valley and surrounding mountains possess a strategic value in the battle for South America, and an infantry assault supported by light armor vehicles is likely by both armies as US forces defend the nearby Dam.

VIP Map Pack 2 will expand the multiplayer experience on Arica Harbor and Laguna Presa.

VIP members will be able to expand on the deep and ever changing sandbox experience, which in itself provides near endless hours of entertainment, by having new content to keep things fresh. It also plays a vital part in making sure you, the players get proper value for the money you’ve invested in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. This is why these map packs are available at no extra cost, contradicting the industry standard and what our direct competitors are doing. Of course, it also helps avoid segmenting the community, making sure everyone can play together having the same maps available. There will be future paid downloadable content as well but these packs will focus on expanding other parts of the game experience rather than the selection of maps available for the basic game modes. We’re dedicated to taking care of this product for a long time – helping you avoid “mapathy” without getting nickel-and-dimed.

Source…

BFBC2 PC server R6 is going to server providers now. This server version should stop all the PB INIT errors that have been happening.

Read the full Source.

After last nights EA server outage on PS3 and PC, EA have found the issue and put a fix in place and brought the servers back online. This means that both PS3 and PC players can return back to playing Bad Company 2.

We are aware of a number of remaining disconnect issues on PC and we have released the “R5” server to hosts yesterday to address some of the disconnects. We are continuing to work on the remaining disconnect issues to have a solution as fast as possible as well as looking into reports of other issues raised on the forums for consoles.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 has managed to prove so popular that yesterday the concurrent users in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 surpassed that in Battlefield 2 which has been going strong for almost 5 years.

http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/battlefield_bad_company/archive/2010/03/06/ea-server-and-battlefield-bad-company-2-disconnect-status.aspx