Server R18 had a crashbug in it. We have resolved it, and will soon send out server R19 to the RSPs.

A few RSPs will be trialling the server during this evening/morning. The new server update will begin rollout with all RSPs during Tuesday if no gotchas are found.


Changelog
Fixed the most common server crash. The story behind this one is fairly convoluted:

When a player begins the process of joining a server, the server will begin buffering some kinds of information in anticipation of the player completing the loading & joining phase. However, players sometimes get stuck in the loading screen. This makes the server buffer more and more info for that player. A side effect of this is a temporary resource leak in the game server. The leak is immediately restored if the server changes map, or the player completes loading, or the player shuts down the game client. However if a player manages to remain stuck for 30+ minutes in loading on a server with lots of activity and the server doesn’t end the round, then the server could run out of the particular resource – it would then crash.

The new server version will forcibly disconnect clients which are threatening to exhaust that particular resource. With this change in place, we do not know of anything that would make high-ticket servers less stable than normal-ticket servers.

Long banlists will not crash the server.

The banlist supports up to 10.000 entries now. This limit can be raised in the future.
The banList.list command has been modified to return at most 100 entries at a time (similar to how BC2 PC’s banList.list command works).
Any administrative tools will need to be updated to be able to see more than the first 100 entries.

Corrections to the banlist documentation.


Docs
The R18 documentation applies to R19 as well. It can be found here: http://static.cdn.ea.com/dice/u/f/bfbc2/tmp/BF3_PC_Server_R18_902705_Docs_ServerAdministrator.zip [static.cdn.ea.com]

PB issues are separate from the game server update. We're working with EB on it.

Regarding reporting hackers on unranked servers:
I wouldn't bother because we evidence gathering is more difficult from the unranked servers.


Regarding kicking people that get stuck in the loading screen:
- a game client should never be able to take down a server, no matter what.
- there are many potential reasons why the client can remain in the loading screen. There will be new ways which cause this in the future. It can be used as an attack to crash servers.
- when the server crashes, there is a clear place to start digging. something bad happened, and I can ask someone knowledgeable to work backwards from there.
Because of the above reasons, we have implemented the kicking mechanism. It keeps servers from going down, and those clients which get disconnected would never have made it into the game session anyway.

Whether or not to investigate reasons why clients occasionally get stuck in the loading screen is then a separate issue. Similar to joining a server sometimes fails due to connectivity problems, joining a server sometimes fails by getting stuck in the loading screen - my personal opinion is that we should prioritize anything which keeps people from getting into the game in the same game in the same way when identifying what to tackle.


I have no timelines regarding the current PB problems.