Today, 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).

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.

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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. The DLC #2 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 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.

Finally, a big shout-out to all the fans that are playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at the moment. We can see from the logs that you’re spending some crazy hours on the Battlefield – in only the last 24 hours you all logged more than 2.5 million game hours. Impressive!

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As you probably noticed, we have experienced an outage across EA servers today, this was caused by a routing issue outside of EA's control but it has been solved and things are back up and running again.

Tomorrow at 8:00 GMT/9:00 CET and 12:00 (midnight) PST the EA servers will be brought down for maintenance. There is no current time for when the servers will return so keep an eye on our Twitter for more up to date information as we get it: http://twitter.com/OfficialBFBC2

On a more positive note, we have released the R6 server to server providers today which should stop the PB INIT FAILURE messages that have been causing problems recently, as well as releasing new server versions, we are still investigating and fixing connectivity and stability problems that are being reported in the forums http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-bad-company-2-pc/.

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Possible Fix for the PunkBuster problem.

• Visit: PunkBuster
• Download PBsetup (3.4) install, run and add the game.
• Select the game and click check for updates.
• Navigate to: "installdir\pb\htm" (e.g.: "C:\Games\Electronic Arts\Battlefield Bad Company 2\pb\htm")
• Check for: wc002158.htm, wa001382.htm If YES, skip to next step else download (link in point 1) and place them in pb\htm
• Now also download pbsec.htm (for Players not Admin) from the link and place that both of these locations (to make sure): "Battlefield Bad Company 2/pb/htm/", "Battlefield Bad Company 2/pb/"

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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: http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-bad-company-2-ng/ and PC: http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-bad-company-2-pc/

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.

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UPDATE #2: Servers back on!
UPDATE: Our ranked server is online again. But the Ea-problem persists.

The EA MasterServers for Battlefield Bad Company 2 are currently offline.
As locust9(twitter) said, they are working on an outage and EA will fix this problem as soon as possible.

Here is an information regarding this issue (french - BSN-Gaming):

"Bonjour,Ce message est pour vous informer qu'EA opère présentement une maintenance sur leur master serveur, qui devrait aider à venir à bout des bugs vécus par plusieurs. Cette maintenance est déjà en cours, et afin d'aider à accélerer le processus, EA demande à tous les providers de fermer un total de 40 000 slot.
Nous allons fermer nos serveurs publics mais si vous voulez donner un coup de main à leurs techniciens qui travaillent jour et nuit depuis la sortie du jeu, nous vous demandons de considérer l'option de stopper vos serveurs par le game panel, et ce jusqu'à la fin de cette maintenance*.
Sachez que ceci n'est pas une obligation, mais plutôt un coup de pouce volontaire que pouvez choisir de leur donner. Nous espérons tous que ceci mettra fin aux problèmes de plantages de BFBC2.

*Fin de la maintenance: 3h am Amérique / 9h am/ France"

End of maintenance : 3AM in US, 8AM in UK, 9 AM in FR

We can not confirm this at this moment. Stay tuned.

P.S. Our server is offline, too.

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The official Battlefield Bad Company 2 Stats Page is finally up and ready for use.
Includes all the cool stuff: Unlocks, Leaderboard, Time until new rank, weapon, time in vehicle... ahhh scew it.

See the screen below or visit it by yourself: http://battlefieldbadcompany2.com/soldier (Log In -> navigate to "MY SOLDIER")

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