* We have released an update to the BF3 PC game client via Origin. It is ~500MB large. Everyone will be prompted to install the update.
* We have updated the master servers - mainly stability fixes.
* We have updated Battlelog - see the blog post for details.
* We have sent out a new game server build to all PC RSPs.

The new server is R9, build ID 886605.
Manual here: http://static.cdn.ea.com/dice/u/f/bfbc2/tmp/BF3_PC_Server_R9_886605_Docs_ServerAdministrator_v2.zip [static.cdn.ea.com]

Battlelog will only show Server R9 or newer. This is because the new game client is no longer compatible with the older game servers. The RSPs are gradually updating their servers. As they complete the update you will see more and more servers in the browser.

Here is a near-complete changelist for the game servers:

* Support for unranked servers (vars.ranked)
* Ranked servers have a few settings as read-only (see documentation)
* Unranked servers allow changing of all settings
* Reintroduced vars.allUnlocksUnlocked for unranked servers
* The game server will parse all of Startup.txt even if an error is encountered
* vars.roundStartPlayerCount / vars.roundRestartPlayerCount handling rewritten to be more natural
* vars.maxPlayers cannot be used to go past the server's max number of slots any more
* Security updates to the game server
* Fixed several server crashes, hangs, and a 10-second stall - all of which which would make the server drop every player
* vars.gamePassword can only be invoked during server startup, not while the server is already running
* vars.teamKillCountForKick 0 will disable team kicking instead of kicking people frivolously
* banList.add would sometimes crash; fixed now
* EOD bot scoring exploit fix

If you are a server administrator that run ranked servers, then you should take note that a few settings are no longer changeable for ranked servers.
The most notable example here is that you are no longer able to set the min # of players to start a round to less than 4. This is to prevent statspadding.
Secondly, the idle timeout mechanism is always on, and set at 300 seconds on ranked servers. This is to prevent people idling for long swathes of time on ranked servers. Having idle kick at 5 minutes is harsh, and we will revisit the max timeout for Server R10 - however, we do not plan to allow for turning of the idle kick altogether.

If you are a server administrator that run unranked servers, notice that you should set the server to unranked by having a 'vars.ranked false' at the top of your Startup.txt. You must set it to unranked during the server startup; once the server is present on Battlelog, it can no longer be switched between ranked and unranked status. Once it is set to unranked, all other settings can be controlled. And yes, the setting for unlocking all weapons & gadgets (vars.allUnlocksUnlocked) is back.