DICE has announced on the Battlefield portal that ranked Battlefield 2/2142 servers have been breached. It seems that a group of people obtained the necessary python files to take an unranked server and make it ranked. Once this group was able to accomplish this, they made modifications to the python files to change the way that the scoring works to modify the point values for kills and revives from the standard one or two points into millions of points instead.

Once they accomplished this, they then developed a tool that allows the spoofing of player hash IDs to take any player account and artificially inflate the stats and scoring to make it look like the player was hacking. This has led to many of the top players being listing on the Punkbuster Master Ban list. We suspect that many of these accounts will receive a stat reset, as well, as they look like cheaters.

Suspicion seems ripe that this group of “hackers” were able to get access to the ranked files across FTP that was active on some ranked server. According to rumors FTP access will be blocked on all ranked servers in the future.

This is another mess for DICE and EA for the Battlefield Series, which have been plagued by cheating and hacks for some time now. Due to all of the hacks and cheating, many players have lost faith in the Series and DICE/EA’s ability to block and prevent cheating. Some have continued to complain to DICE/EA, while others have moved on to other titles, including COD4, ETQW, and the upcoming FFOW.

DICE needs to dedicate resources immediately to stamp out the cheating and restore user confidence in the Battlefield Series, but some feel this is unlikely as DICE has moved on Battlefield: Bad Company and Battlefield Heroes. We expect DICE to do something, but we can’t help but suspect that due to limited resources, they will again do only the minimum necessary to plug the problem, rather than trying to fix the cheating at large.

Speaking of Battlefield: Bad Company, a recent EA conference call has indicated that the delay for the console title has been pushed out until sometime between April 1st, 2008 to March 31st, 2009.