EA Drops the Ban Hammer on Battlefield 3 Exploiters

Players using an xp-boosting game loophole are on notice.

EA isn’t messing around when it comes to the balancing for Battlefield 3. The company banned several accounts over the weekend of players who had been using an in-game exploit to boost their experience gains.

"This week we've banned hundreds of offending accounts and have stats-wiped accounts for exploiting (such as boosting)," EA wrote on the official Battlefield Twitter. "We are working on banning as many people as we can as quickly as we can. We have a zero tolerance policy for cheating."

The exploit involves players using the Engineer class constantly repairing a friendly bot while another team member fires on it. The Engineer gets fast xp, and then team members switch off. EA has stated that they are working on a patch and will get it implemented soon. For an example of the exploit, you can check it out here. But don't try it, lest you get the ban hammer!

Also up on the docket for fixes is the reduction of the brightness for the tactical flashlight weapon attachment. Gameplay designer Alan Kertz spoke recently about the issues with the over-effectiveness of the attachment, and showed an example of the improvement on his Twitter. Check that out here.

Our Take

Julian Titus Senior Editor

11/15/2011 at 09:23 PM

Personally, I think if a game has exploits its up to the developers to iron them out. If it's in the game, its not cheating.

Michael117

11/16/2011 at 12:20 PM

Wow that tactical flashlight attachment is brutal, the brightness and spread is obnoxious. Sometimes exploits are fun, other times it makes a game no longer fun to play. When Halo 2 came out there were so many interesting bugs, the most fascinating bugs I've ever seen a game but no matter what happened the game was always fun to play for some reason. There was a team slayer match running one time and by accident one of my teammates got a warthog stuck on a bridge and an opponent shot a rocket at him, and the rocket began to orbit around the warthog and bridge. It was so weird that the entire battle broke down and both teams stopped fighting, came together by the warthog and kept firing rockets to put in orbit around the warthog/bridge. Everybody from red and blue laughed, and started dicking around instead of killing each other. Those are the kinds of memories that are priceless and don't happen very often with most games, but it happens all the time in Halo games. There were so many other fun bugs in Halo 2 and 3 and the example I just used was probably the most boring of them all lol, just goes to show how many crazy ones we would always find. The bugs and exploits in Halo games usually extended well into the campaigns too. My favorite was the Outskirts level in Halo 2 where you were able to play the beginning encounter spaces like a big platform level by jumping you're way up to the rooftops and making your way across the rooftops of the whole area, bypassing the enemy. It was as if it was designed to be able to provide the opportunity to curious players because in one encounter space you even find a sniper rifle hidden in a niche around the rooftops. For the curious, the pathways to the rooftops and across them were hidden, fun to discover, but not too difficult to explore. It's one of the things that probably inspired my platformer Forge World maps in Halo Reach.

For contrast I played a bit of Gears multiplayer back in the day and the exploits we would find weren't fun, like host advantages and stuff like that. The Gears universe and mechanics weren't really ripe for fun glitches, physics, or bugs like Halo is. In Team Fortress 2 (my favorite competitive multiplayer game ever) the bugs weren't very fun or entertaining either like being able to snipe people from up in the skybox on Dustbowl or shooting through the ceiling in 2Fort and having the damage transfer to people and sentries above. It was fun to mess around with glitches for a match but it wore off and eventually people were just using it to help them win and it wasn't fun anymore.

PixlBit