BF2 serverhosting with stats

Recently the Battlefield community has been quite upset by the news that EA would only allow its own official servers to use its ranking system. A concerned member of the Danish Battlefield community and the BFV clan The Apostles called Blaznee took the initiative to write to EA about this matter. Here's the response he received:

Here is an answer from our BF2 team:

We want to ensure that people who want to track their stats, go up in ranks and compare their scores with others feel that the system is safe and that people are not hacking there way to the top. We think of it almost like a sport, where everyone has the same rules, equipment and chance of winning and what determines the outcome is skill.

We have looked at every possible way to allow the public at large to host servers and feed the statistics from their games into the overall Battlefield 2 database. We want the public to host ranked servers:

Publicly hosted servers cover much more areas of the world than we can.
EA and it’s partners have to pay money to maintain servers (hardware, admins, bandwidth).

Unfortunately we know from past history, that some people will try and gain an unfair advantage by hacking. We cannot, at this time, find a way to reasonable assure people that the system is fair if anyone can host a ranked server and possibly hack it.

The only way we can reasonably assure people that there is a level playing field is for us to have security on the servers that provide the statistics. So, what we are doing is:

Increasing the number and locations that EA servers are located around the world.
This includes adding servers to more areas of Europe, North America and Asia and Australia
Partnering with organizations who are willing to host ranked servers in secure locations. This includes ISPs, Hardware Manufacturers, etc. These partners are located all over the world.
We have tools in place to review people’s scores, how they got those scores (actions, who was in the match, etc.) as well as review the actual match (using the Battle Recorder) to watch for and correct any cheating.
We are adding admins to monitor our ranked servers to help people who have issues.
People, clans, etc. can rent servers (in the same way that currently exists for BF42 and BFV) and those servers can be ranked if the renter wants it to be.
The reason we can do this because the renter has no physical access to the server and has no opportunity to hack it. They simply can change the server setting.

I hope this clarifies what we are doing and why we are doing it. If we can find a way to have the public host ranked servers while at the same time being reasonably assured that the playing field is level, we will absolutely do so.

In other words it sounds as if we shouldn't worry too much about this issue. EA will select a number of secure server hosts around the world so all us non-Americans should have a fair chance of finding a server with a decent ping that has the official ranking system enabled.

Here at Boomtown we truly hope that we will be able to offer ranked servers to the community so you will be able to enjoy the ultimate gaming experience when playing on our servers. Let's hope EA feels the same way.

Thanks to Blaznee for making us aware of this.