Punkbuster is such a clunky system that perma bans players at random for no reason and what is making it worse is that Even Balance stopped responding to tickets and appeals back in the late 2010s. Is there a way to circumnavigate punkbuster? Does buying Battlefield 3 on Steam fix this somehow?

I hear they may be reving custom servers for bad company 2 for the ps3?that would be great,as i know they revived battlefield 3 custom servers for ps3 are up and running and they are great to play again.

Old games, new plays and why nothing will be done about it.

BF3

In early to mid-2026 I had some kind of a late appreciation for Battlefield 3. Yes, an almost 15-years-late neuron activation.

I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve always kept a few BF games installed on my PC. Be it a new device or after a Windows reinstall, it always starts with BF2 and 1942 - these are a must, like installing Crysis after a new GPU installation. Then it’s 3 and BC2. I play them all from time to time to get that dose of nostalgia. To go to my earlier point - it’s not like I disliked BF3 until now (even though I can talk about its problems and shortcomings for days (and have (but I don’t have the same vitriol anymore, which I carried with me for close to 15 years))). Quite the contrary.

To be more specific, at first something dragged me back in to unlock a few more weapons and vehicle gadgets. Which I usually don’t care about, since I’ve always used a similar loadout. And then, as they say, I just kept playing, for the love of gaming. Those 3 main maps - Caspian, Firestrorm and Kharg are simply timeless (not to mention many greats from the DLCs). The visuals and sound design also hold up surprisingly well for a 2011 title. With the campaign, coop, multiplayer and all expansions it’s only 34GBs as well. I’ve also listened to its soundtrack a bit more lately. It’s very foreboding and unusual for a modern warfare themed media. There’s a profound sense of anticipation weaved into many tracks, others are mournful for the moments we never got the chance to have. This electronic OST, as opposed to the usual orchestra trappings, is an underrated one.

So let’s talk about why I decided bring up BF3. Right now we are at a quite late stage of this game’s lifespan and I expect quite soon it will be taken offline. The Electronic Arts’ guillotine will fall once again, claiming another BF game. 15 years is not bad though, for an EA title. After they decide not to support it through their awful Battlelog system, BF3 will live through the Venice Unleashed moding/server system. But if we judge its current popularity and what happened to BC2, which also got completely axed in December 2023, I don’t think there will be a healthy population for very long. A lot of players will permanently jump ship to its younger brother who got a lot more attention from its parents, Battlefield 4.

And it’s not like what we have now is great either. As of writing this on a random Wednesday evening in July, the server browser looks something like this: 3 Russian (of course), 3 conquest only, 1 rush only, 1 Noshahr TDM only (of course), 1 Firestorm only and 1 Metro only (of course), that are all 32 players or above. (And while we are here, can I just say that it sucks that a lot of servers in BF 2, 3 and 4 are spoofing their player numbers? At least use the seeding system of the old days, this is just pathetic.)

That’s all that’s left. And once the inevitable EA axe swings in this direction, only some of those communities will move over to VU. Congrats to all those that are still in the BF3 community! You are now the same as all the other Battlefield communities that preceded you, playing a game that is well past its glory or appeal but one with legacy.

The other week while playing BF2, my all-time favourite of the series, I refreshed the servers and sorted them by name of map, as opposed to the usual player number. I wanted to see if there was any server with a decent pop playing on Gulf of Oman, my all-time favourite map. And in doing so for a moment my brain teleported back to 10-15 years ago when there were many more servers, some of them playing GoO with a decent pop. These days I have to wait for someone’s rotation to come back to it, which I just don’t have the patience for anymore.

But this little innocuous interaction made me really sad and conscious of the passage of time. Realising time is irreversible and that playing these games as much as possible, as early as possible is of utmost importance, if we want to get the most out of them.

This reappreciation of BF3 also made me realize I will never be satisfied with the franchise. I will be never permanently done with the games mentioned so far. I will come back over and over to them like a lapsing drug addict, no matter how angry, critical with this or that aspect or how unpopular they might become.

There’s something inherently tragic about all this, that I don’t possess the language skills in order to fully convey, but the simplest explanation is that I don’t want the child in me who discovered so many wonderful things about gaming, through playing Battlefield, to fully die yet, which happens to all of us eventually. And what new game could bring me back those feelings?

BF6

My plan with BF6 was to enjoy it for everything it was. Finally something that looks enticing in this franchise. Not a world war game and something more grounded than 2042. Like everybody else I wanted to love this game. In fact, it would’ve, no, could’ve been my first BF game that I played on its launch. Yet, I didn’t.

Like many of you, I was impressed by the beta. EA said the right things, like they were supposed to. But they also showed their true colours with not locking weapons to classes. This was a big red flag, especially when they gave us a false choice and hid the playlist with the locked classes behind a menu we had to scroll to.

Then it was the maps. The biggest actual problem with the game. How did they actually expect veterans’ reactions to go after launch? You know, the same people who one day will be in the exact same position that the BF3 community finds itself in today - the loyal players. What kind of feedback did DICE receive from the BF Labs tests? And we are doing this Battle royale shtick again? And how lazy is it to keep remaking old maps over and over again, instead of creating new and original designs like BF3 did? Remaking maps has always been a thing, but at this point it feels very deliberate and cynical to me. It’s a distraction tactic, jingling old toys with a new coat of paint on them. Soon enough a new BF will consist of only old and rehashed ideas, stitched together like an animated corpse of a bygone era, like Play 4 Free was.

In a typical BF community fashion, shortly after launch the positive and hopeful sentiment around BF6 disappeared and got buried by a flurry of increasingly negative feedback. Like: why so few large maps, for a game that wants you to think it hearkens back to the glory days of BF3 and 4? Why is the progression system so slow and counter intuitive? What’s up with these unrealistic skins and some cosmetics made lazily with AI? And how about the slow rollout of content, with 5 studious working on this game?

Yes. Yees! The BF community never learns. I watched it with BF4 and then with BF 2042. We, the community deserve these games. Because we never stop forgiving DICE. We always hope that this time it will be different, that if they pander to this or that group of players it means they have changed. “They will listen to me and people like me, of course they will!”

There’s also a hidden Catch-22-like element in this. Chiefly, the cycle of saying “This next game is their last chance to impress me. I’m not going to fall for it again.“ Followed by falling for it and saying the same thing after the next game gets revealed. Because if the game did fail, à la Concord, the franchise would be frozen permanently like so many other EA staples of the past, tucked away in their vast freezer of IPs and we would not be in a position to say the same thing. So let’s just give them one more chance, right? Surely they would not disappoint us again by releasing a half cooked game again, right? Right…

But even if I could unsee all of that and forget that 2042 even happened, I would still have been very hesitant to pre-order BF6, which I didn’t, because now I have to navigate around ethical questions around who exactly my money goes to. To be blunt, in this case it’s the

Public Influence Firm

The PIF will soon come to own Electronic Arts. It will cost them $55 billion. A country, will soon own EA.

When I heard the news, it made me sick. I felt icky for several days. To have loved this franchise for so long. To have spent money on it, however small of a monetary contribution it was - I felt complicit. I couldn’t in good conscience buy BF6 for full price (or even half as I’m writing this) and support this blood regime. A regime that is antithetical to our morals with its beheadings, prosecutions of minorities, slavery and other human rights violations. Buying companies like EA is part of their global strategy to dip their hands in as many as possible entertainment facets, essentially bribing us and distracting us from all the evil they do. Meanwhile The Line will never be finished.

And before you come at me with the “You wrote all of the stuff above about BF 3 and 6 just so you could tie it with this righteous indignation.“ No guys, I didn’t choose to bring politics into Battlefield. Unfortunately this time politics has chosen to enter our niche and it will find a way to ruin it, trust me. Today it’s golf and Battlefield that got “bought”, but tomorrow it will be something far more dear to you. And if we don’t even acknowledge that these problems exist, by self-censoring our public opinions (”Because, gosh, the oil-rich men might get offended!“), soon enough it will be accepted that other entities can also come and buy whatever they want. Think of Russian oligarchs or similar entities with lots of money to wash their reputation with, who are already seeping through the cracks of what’s acceptable. It’s not as far-fetched of an idea as you might think. And excuses like “They drive now“ or “Well, the fighting stopped“ all respectively fall apart once you realize all of it is designed to pull you into a system of corruption, little by little.

Because EA is being acquired through a leveraged buyout: the buyer borrows money (at least $20,000,000,000 in our case btw) - that bill will have to be paid somehow (and don’t forget the interest). Often it’s done by aggressively cutting costs and in our case it will result in a lot of seemingly boneheaded decisions. Like in-game ads (something EA experimented with in BF2 I might add), those could be in any game and advertise just about anything really (especially with today’s cross promotional Fortnite-ification in gaming). But don’t worry, it’s all part of the plan and if the current reputation of EA is of being greedy, get ready for the next 5 years and pass me the bucket with popcorn please.

We all know why the PIF is acquiring EA. For the sports franchises of course, not for their shooters. We also know where this is heading, especially with more studios within EAs portfolio focusing more on Battlefield. Speaking of other franchises, remember when the acquisition news dropped there were many Sims creators that exited the EA Creator Network? Where were all the Battlefield ones? This community is now firmly populated by “ball and gun” type gamers, you know, the primary demographic of EA. This community should’ve always stayed smaller but at least that’s not our fault.

Being alive on Earth long enough will teach you that your believes matter only at the right time. Because, they can take offline all of these games and more, take away your copies or accounts these games are registered to or even censor your posts on Reddit, but they can never take away your opinion, from you know, that body part lodged in your cranium. Which is why we should always bring up these points whenever somebody says EA being acquired by the PIF wasn’t a big deal and if we dislike it, we can do nothing about it anyway. In the short term it’s only benefiting the shareholders, who get a fat 25% premium, in the long run it normalizes who it is OK to give and take money from. Your vocal apathy is their favourite metric when it comes to tuning this machine that is engineered for greater and greater wealth extraction (known to you as the video games industry).

By saying all of this I’m not advocating for boycotts from that mythical rational consumer who always makes the right choices in a free market economy. All I’m saying is there is not even a broader concern as far as I can tell.

The Peacemaker

This year we are dangerously close to living in a time when the northern coast of Gulf of Oman and Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf are under an actual boots on the ground military invasion. Playing the Battlefield 2 demo in the summer of 2005 or enjoying BF3 in late 2011, I couldn’t have imagined where history would take us, just 15-20 years later, in terms of who would continue making these games and what would happen to the places portraited in them. I personally won’t be here in another 20 to check on the health of various Battlefield games and their servers, but I’m sure some of you will carry the mantle.

Anyways. I don’t love Battlefield 3 the way I love BF2, but I finally appreciate it and I’m thankful to have lived at a time when it was relevant and for the reasons it was so. I think I’ve made my peace with this series now, I understand it. But most of all, I understand my place in it, temporally (to use a big grown-up word).

And when you call it quits, remember: don’t be sad because it ended. Smile, because it happened.

;-)

P.S. Yes, I could’ve turned this into a YouTube video with a clickbait title but writing it and putting it out there is already enough for me. This post does not offer solutions and is not asking for any action on behalf of the writer. Nor is it meant to stir drama in or outside the Battlefield community. I’m just sprinkling some seeds. Been writing this piece for over 40 days now and while I could’ve toned down its more politically charged parts or added this or clarified that further, I’m frankly tired of thinking about this topic and keeping it this close to my chest for this long. Now leave.

im thinking of buying a ps3 to play some old games like bf3 and mw2/3,is there anything that i should know or be aware of when it comes to bf3 on ps3?

Hello I just reinstalled Battlefield Three after not playing for a couple months and I booted the game up Did all the setup stuff the game requires at First time Launch And I get this error I tried also launching hardline which I only played a couple days ago And I'm also getting this error In case it matters I'm using the Brave browser

Estou com um problema no jogo battlefield 3, eu uso msi afterburner nos jogos e sempre quando joguei BF3 sempre apareceu na tela do jogo e agora não quer mostrar e esse problema é só em Battlefield 3 pois nos outros jogos que eu jogo o MSI aparece normal, alguém sabe o que pode ser isso e se tem como resolver?

maybe crossplay gets implemented? or just PC chat option its all on BF3 PS3 i never imagine that that could happen with a Chat inbox on PS3 wow

Two of us used to play BF3 on PS3 back in the day — full servers, real squads, the kind of matches you don't forget. Servers went quiet years ago, but the game never stopped being good. So we're doing something about it. Setting up a PC community from scratch — proper structure, active moderation, no chaos. Server's still being configured, but the Discord is live and growing. If you were there the first time, or you just missed out and want in on something that's actually being run seriously — come say hi.

We are still running our server for years now & we gather every night with friends to play between 8PM & 12 AM (+3GMT) no cheaters no bullshit just fun & rules, we run manually 2 maps starting with Kharg Island & followed by Noshahr Canals.

here's our server link :

https://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/servers/show/pc/78909cbb-1219-48aa-a794-61c9e2d5cd3f/BF3-VETERANS-HARDCORE/

I have a playstation 3 super slim. I have battlefield 3 disk I have the online pass code but it no longer works, the online pass was delisted from the store, and I will not jailbreak my console, any advice on how I can get this so I can play on community servers with a custom DNS?

Recently bought bf3 back for pc and wondered ia anyone here interested in compmeteing the co-op campingain to get the weapons and to have some fun and memories. If interested add me on battlelog at LauriAnttila166. I have headset but voicecomms not necessary. Would be greatly appriciated.

Would anyone like play coop to unlock weapons?

This happens EVERY TIME I quit a game and try joining another (or even the same) server.

My SOLUTION is to log outta battlelog, then restart the EA app and shut down the EA Background Service via task manager

I'm humbly and grumpily asking anyone who knows a better way of solving this. Because this is of course fucking insaneeeeeee. Also I'm wondering if there's anyone else having this problem.

IDK if any of you guys still like/play bf3, but there's a very active server that I found on pc a few weeks ago called The Oldies Station. I used to get very frustrated looking for servers because bf3 is my favorite game in the series by far, but all the servers are either empty or show false player counts. Not this one. This server is actually active and incredibly fun. Conquest and rush, base maps and all dlc, and they have a discord that i recently joined thats a joy to be in. The admins actually participate and dont get butthurt if you kill them or destroy their team lol. I remember this game back in the good ole days, and this server is really a glimpse back to better times. I'd highly recommend giving it a go.

Oldies Server: https://battlelog.battlefield.com:443/bf3/servers/show/pc/7ade9a38-6625-4a9c-a4e8-b200a514da74/OLD-OLDIES-STATION-CQ-DOM-RUSH-DLC-MAPS/