In a move that many will not like, EA Games has banned or delisted over 1,000 servers running their recently released Battlefield 2 demo. In a community update issued earlier today, EA Games had this to say about the situation:
EA and DICE both fully support server-side modding in the sense that we have intentionally exposed a good deal of Python functionality to the end-user, primarily to encourage modders to tweak game types and scoring (on UNRANKED servers) once the full game is available. That said, we have come to discover that two items that were not a part of the demo feature-set were hacked in the Battlefield 2 demo. We consider both of these changes in violation of the Tools EULA that each server operator accepted in installing the server software.
The demo's feature set included a 12-minute time limit on rounds and excluded access to the weapon unlocks. Because some server operators have hacked the time limit out of their servers or hacked access to the unlocks, we have been forced to reinforce our intended feature set by delisting the offending servers. All violations of the EULA as described above will result in a 1-week ban/delisting.
The activities of the obviously active hacking community reinforce our decision to not release the Ranked server publicly with the final product. Our desire is to be able to offer an exploit-free place to play where players can legitimately gain ranks, and collect awards and unlocks. The only way we can offer such a service and protect the Ranked server content is by hosting the ranked servers directly and through trusted partners. The Unranked server tools will be released to the community so that they may host their own BF2 servers, mods, etc.
News source: Battlefield 2 community update
