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I'm going to make this short and sweet folks.

Get your BFBC2 servers streaming with the following settings!!!!

How_To_Get_Your_Servers_Streaming#Battlefield:_Bad_Company_2

I was just checking the news sites looking for something unrelated, when I caught a quote going around many of them including over at gamespy (See link below). On a conference call reporting Activision blizzard's quarterly earnings. Our good old "friend" and CEO, Rob Kotick let lose with his design on how to squeeze every penny out of the COD franchise. To bad it is unimaginative, myopic and in the end less profitable. You may want to read further to the conclusion.

To quote Mr. Kotick: “If you think about the success that we’ve had in other product categories on subscription you can get a sense of the direction that we want to take that franchise [Call of Duty]”.

As a 'past customer'
It would seem that the recent soothing hollow words from Rob Bowling, community manager at Infinity Ward were just that, in an effort to reduce the impact on sales due to the backlash from removing dedicated servers and the creative community for Modern Warfare 2. As expected and reported in an opinion piece at PsB, just a few weeks ago Iw Modern Warfare 2 Kills Dedicated Servers It seems the foretelling is the direction Activision is heading. Under the direction of CEO Kotick the goal seems to be, just how much can be gained by throwing out a very workable business model needing very little change for a copycat version of the warcraft subscription system.

I'm not going to sit here and say it's not about the cash because it is and always will be about the money. Nothing wrong with that This is about a misdirection and destruction of a genre. Not because it's right to do, but because he feels there are a few more quarters to be made this way. The fallacy is that this will take a winning franchise and turn it to crap very quickly. Then where will the money be? Sure, there is a segment that will pay to play, but why kill the cow when you can have both and make more. You can have both and I like money as much as the next guy. Mr. Kotick may think it has to be done by herding the cattle into one barn. But there are two markets here to exploit if it's designed correctly and it can. Let me see if I can simplify it for Mr. Kotick with my poor mans analogy. Some people want the simplicity with having a contract for a year with no worries, while others like pay as you go phones to be more flexible than a 1 year contract allows. It's how the world works. Sure the contract business is very good, but forcing a contract on everyone will not gain more customers than having both offerings and others will step in to take it, if you don't. That's why phone companies have pay as you go. To bring in that segment even if it's smaller it still makes money and the customers are happy with what they get. This Kotick plan is short sighted and lacking in any creativity, but it's Mr. Kotick's agenda or so it seems He thinks overal he will come out ahead. All he is doing is making it so that the stakeholders may not see his failure to make more profit. Nice trick, but he can't think outside the box and that is obvious. This is simply the old school business of slash and burn. You simply can't credit Mr. Kotick of any creative thinking there. Perhaps he simply can't grasp how to multitask a business model. That only works out to the detriment of everyone.

Mr. Kotick appears to indicate that the FPS market players are drones, meant to serve the queen. Umm ok. That maybe true for the console market, but the PC share is still in the 10's of millions of dollars with percentages aside between the two. That still ain't chump change and can be improved. As long as he can win the console sheep into paying every month, the PC's will follow, so he thinks he can't lose. He'll simply BS to explain to the board next quarters, that the drop or failure to grow in the PC sales segment, is due to the market shift in playing games on consoles and the PC segment is simply not a growth market, as home buyers shift their focus and buy consoles. He simply can't falter with that line, however misguided it really is. As long as the BS sounds good on the surface. He fails to understand the mindset of those two segments. He has failed to capitalize on the PC side because of it. He is shrinking the market, its not the forces of change doing it. People do play on both platforms and for different reasons. You need to consider this, but mostly understand it as you are failing to do. There's money in there Mr. Kotick and you are missing it.

Mr. Kotick has no idea he is missing an opportunity to stabilize and grow a profitable and strong PC community based franchise, and more. He really is overlooking the dollars lying there, for the shiny quarters scattered about. He see's one business model instead of capitalizing on the strengths of a second. What a sad state of affairs when Activision's CEO can't see past the next business quarterly reports, to a sustainable and profitable segment sitting right under his nose. But it assumes he understood it, but he doesn't, not even close. It seems Activision is behind the times not everyone else, as he would make the stakeholders believe. There is a very profitable path to create and exploit if there were any creative brains at the helm. I'd rather have $1.50 in my wallet as profit than the shiny $0.50 that's easy to see. To bad some are to myopic to see past the shiny loose change.

More toward the truth perhaps is that porting games from the console code and crushing any independence along with customer created content, is perhaps more in line with the idea he has. Dedicated servers and the active creative community stands in the way of pay to play and of selling content. Even though it doesn't or need to be perceived that way. Mr. Kotick's vision appears to be more about the brave new order and seeming greed. The PC community will submit or be lost. Either way, the PC customer loses and that will affect the bottom line. It seems a win win for the captain of industry Mr. Kotick, with the all to faithful sergeant of PR/BS, Rob Bowling at his side. Along with a generous sprinkling of FUD. Lets have a round of bonuses for the captains of industry shall we. No wonder there are so many reports from inside the gaming industry, that it is becoming more chaotic by the month. The same old school thinking at the helm. You would think by now, GM and it's leadership would have been a lesson learned.

I do apologize to Mr. Kotick if My words seem harsh. I do believe as I'm sure others do, that you are missing opportunity. Oh I'm sure you will make money, I just don't understand the economics of leaving some of it on the ground for just the sake of bending over to pick it up. You may even make customers happy as a side affect of going for all the cash. If you can't see the model I'd be happy to explain it to you. But of course there would be a small fee involved.

followup links: One example at Gamspy's Mike Sharkey article on pay to play for the franchise
And a perhaps not so far off and interesting take from CrunchGear's Nicholas Deleon on how to morph COD into a wow like mmo with lots of cash, cash, cash, for Activision every month.
sigh....

I have some PunksBusted Exclusive News regarding lag that some of you experienced with BF2142. Apparently EvenBalance has found the problem without a need for admins or clients to update anything. I'm sure everyone that experienced this lag will be very happy at the result. This wasn't an easy issue to resolve because of repeatability.

Here is the link to the news item.
Twitter Announcement about the fix
And a follow up in this forum link.
Electronicarts.co.uk forum announcement and comments

Thank you EvenBalance for sticking with this unusual issue and resolving it.

EA Digital Illusions CE AB has contracted with Even Balance, Inc. to integrate PunkBuster™ Anti-Cheat software into the soon to be released title known as Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2. We will soon be opening a section on our website to support PunkBuster™ for Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2.

Our primary sql server run out of diskspace, so I had to switch to secondary server to get everything running again.

Streaming should been fine all that time.

There will be downtime in near future because I need to get primary server also back in action, when that happen, I can't tell yet.

Sorry about downtime.

This is more than an opinion piece. This is the end of IW products in this community and a more sinister side to this. There is anger building and IW are trying to stop it with vague, "maybe" , "let's see how this develops" platitudes.
Please link your friends to this news item here at PsB.

There is some Horrific news out of a podcast with Rob Bowling, community manager at IW in and interview over at BashandSlash.com about what Modern warfare 2 for the PC will be. There will be, No PB, No more dedicated game servers, No game Admins running them and the Mod/map Community is Abandoned completely with no tools and no way to change the game!! This also impacts the game server providers leagues etc. IW has just announced the end of any customer content and the freedom to play the game the way we like.

Here is the link. Listen to the podcast and read the followup.
BASH 123: Pwnt! at BashandSlash.com

Also goto the online petition and add your name.
Dedicated Servers for CoD:MW2

All you dedicated Server admins and mod/map makers just got thrown on the virtual garbage heap without so much as a thank you for making their games what they are today. Now that you did all that hard work, they'll just take your money to built a system that locks you all out. IW feel they can go it alone now. "Thanks for all the fish".

This is also a very serious long term threat to free gaming everywhere. They see money being spent and they want it. IW are clearly saying they will force you to do it their way, or hit the road! If you don't become just an average player then losing you as a customers just isn't in the numbers, so goodbye! This new model isn't about anything more than a way to bring in more money beyond just selling the game. This is about controlling every segment of gaming and later charging for it. For a long time game companies have looked fora model where you don't buy the game but where you subscribe monthly to play it. You can bet the other game companies will be watching because if this works they will jump in and once it's the norm so will the billing per month be the normal way to play FPS games.

There has been much discussion around the net about these systems and where game companies wish to take them. They still want our money and these game companies are thinking in terms of consoles now in how they do it. So PC's need to fall into line with that model and online FPS is just another path to make more money from. Once this model becomes more widely used, your added content will cost all players money. Free places to play will be no more. They can say it isn't in the plan now, but dressing up a pig still makes it a pig. You see it in consoles and mmorg's and it will come to FPS. They want everyone to pay a monthly fee. The basic online game maybe free to play online, but if you want to go past that, then sign up and for pay content.

Don't be fooled by this, 'it will make it more accessible for everyone' line. That simply means more customers that later when they turn on the pay content portion of the IW.net system. I don't believe. 'our intent is not this', line either. Intent only means today, it doesn't mean it won't happen after they get this up, running and debugged. In my opinion just like history shows us when systems like IW.net have been created, that it is nothing more than a distribution and billing system. It steals our freedom to decide.

The PC gamers and communities are not the same as the console gamers and we don't want to be! This will kill our freedom, creativity and much more. It will become just another way to dip into our pockets and nothing more.

Please listen carefully to this interview in it's entirety and pay special attention to what he says and what he doesn't say. Especially when he claims not to know, or should that be, IW just keeping secret their intentions for this system later. It's very long but the further in you go and down to the last second you will hear just how devastating this really is. It will be harder to rebuild a community once it is gone, if at all.

I for one will not support this. They won't be getting my money and I'm just a an average player demographic. Get the word out to all the other admins, clans and leagues. We can't stop it now, but we can certainly hurt them and hurt them badly for treating the core of their sales. Then they will see how the not so average player impacts their bottom line.

Sept. 1: We will be doing some equipment maintenance within the next few hours. The site should only be down for a few minutes. The task at hand involves installing a new switch so it shouldn't take long.

Update: Sept. 1, 8:45 PM EDT: The new switch has been placed in service. Still working on getting it configured properly.

Update: Sept. 2, 9:30 AM EDT: Just about finished. JiiPee has a few more tweaks to do and we're done.

Update: Sept. 2, 4:20 PM EDT: JiiPee has done a masterful job completing the new switch setup and all systems are go.

Auto-MBL support has now been added for Wolfenstein. You are now able to submit new applications or edit existing accounts to add in Wolfenstein servers.

The pb_sv_logport required is 24434, as detailed in the Auto-MBL streaming wiki.

This announcement was made in the AA3 Forum, but in case you missed it:

Because of a security issue due to the coding by the developers, PsB had withheld support for AA3 streaming servers; however, that has now changed, thanks to the efforts of [CLS]Airborne, the Hazard AA Clan, Canonball, Magician, and JiiPee. PsB now offers full support to AA3 streaming servers.

We're aware that some people can not see the closed forums, are receiving mails that their servers stopped streaming while the servers are still streaming, certain errors while trying to update the banlist , signatures showing 0 servers and there might be a few others, but all of these are related to the down time from a few days ago.

The scanner is still catching up with the logs streamed, this problem will solve it self as soon as the scanner has caught up.

As many of you notice, we had a little unplanned downtime. Database server run out of disk space and it took a while until I got information "Houston, we have a problem..."

Well I took this time and made a master master replication setup, so now we have 2 sql servers serving same data. Also data transfer over 100Mbps network connection took many many many hours. You might think that 100Mbps is quick, but (our gig switch blew up recently) when you need to copy 250G of data, it's not very quick anymore.

But we are alive again and last I need to say that streaming was working just fine all this time.

Thanks, over and out! // JiiPee

Punkbuster will go in another great game. Here is the announcement: Activision Publishing, Inc. has contracted with Even Balance, Inc. to integrate PunkBuster™ Anti-Cheat software into the online multiplayer section of the highly-anticipated Wolfenstein™, executive produced by id Software™ and developed by Raven Software and Endrant Studios. PunkBuster Anti-Cheat features will be available "out-of-the-box" with the retail release of the game on August 4th, 2009. Here is the official news release. EvenBalance: