Yea sorry, I drifted semi-offtopic. No need to start a forum war about it, get ingame and have a shoot out instead =)

Still, the ping doesn't show despite admin rights most of the time. Anyone know anything else that might be the cause?

Edit: Further, when I can see the ping, it's only on about 10% of all servers, the rest still has a "-".

bfheroes_web.Skitskraj wrote:Yea sorry, I drifted semi-offtopic. No need to start a forum war about it, get ingame and have a shoot out instead =)

Still, the ping doesn't show despite admin rights most of the time. Anyone know anything else that might be the cause?

Edit: Further, when I can see the ping, it's only on about 10% of all servers, the rest still has a "-".

Interesting. That you can see it some of the time should rule out any firewall (one poster said enabling ICMP echo replies for all apps in windows FW fixed it), or for that matter router config/behavior.

When I debugged the game to figure out why admin/uac fixed it for most, I didn't watch much as far as timing.
Really can't, if you breakpoint for too long, the game barfs because timers go whack, and I've not found any internal debug flag to set these to ignore (anyone else poking at it - if you've found one, please pm me).

It may be that the mechanism to get pings waits only so long to get an answer, then moves on th the next server in the list. If I find anything, I'll be sure to post it.

I tried enabling ICMP, and have forwarded ports 80,18390,18395 and 13505.
Possible it's like you say, that the browser just wait so long for a reply before moving on to the next server.
Btw, do the browser really check one ping at a time? Sounds like this would take forever given the number of servers.

bfheroes_web.Skitskraj wrote:I tried enabling ICMP, and have forwarded ports 80,18390,18395 and 13505.
Possible it's like you say, that the browser just wait so long for a reply before moving on to the next server.
Btw, do the browser really check one ping at a time? Sounds like this would take forever given the number of servers.

You shouldn't need to forward any ports for this game, barring a buggy or misconfigured router.
I haven't looked at this in detail, as I said, breakpoint too long and things go haywire, not to mention spending hours disassembling code to determine that is not where I want to spend time
Look at how long the browser takes...it is quite probable. They use a very low level mechanism to get what they call 'ping', so protocol overhead per call should be low.

For those of us running windows xp, only 10% of the servers show a ping. This has been the same ever since the beta. None of the things listed are for xp. This goes to show everyone that the problem lies with EA/Dice and not you as the client. The browser if junk and needs to overhauled.

Another satisfied customer: setting Run as Administrator and turning off User Access Control on Windows 7 (64 bit) and then rebooting, just to be sure, did the trick. I can now see ping numbers for many servers. Thanks, all.

Windows 7 64 bit: I still don't get pings, other than '999' on occasion, and I have UAC off, and run steam as an admin. Anything else I could try?

I've done this, and instead of getting '-'s I get 999 for all servers. Also, when I sort by ping, it seems to be entirely random - I get Russian and UK servers no matter how I sort it - and I'm in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

I'm thinking I'll reset my UAC to normal, remove run as admin from BC2, etc, and re-try it.

This is quite bizarre.

When I try to make a desktop shortcut through steam, it doesn't have the option (right click, properties, etc) to run as administrator. My shortcut via the .exe in the 'common' folder does, though.

The pings show up when I run BC2 as Admin in Win7 with UAC on. But here's the rub... When I run BC2 as admin, my logitech software (G9 mouse, G13 keypad) doesn't detect the game and won't change to the appropriate profile. Logitech has no answer for this either. I've tried running the game normally with UAC off but still don't see ping values. They only seem to appear when running as admin.

Any suggestions to make it ALL work? Could there be a port that needs to be opened in Win7 Firewall to allow ping values to pass? Perhaps a rule that needs to be created? I've allowed all the access I know how to allow to BC2, but no help. What could be the difference in the running enviroment for BC2 between running as admin and normal?

These are a few questions I've came up with that will hopefully spark an idea for you Win7 guru's out there.

battlefield.5150_DuckDodgerz wrote:The pings show up when I run BC2 as Admin in Win7 with UAC on. But here's the rub... When I run BC2 as admin, my logitech software (G9 mouse, G13 keypad) doesn't detect the game and won't change to the appropriate profile. Logitech has no answer for this either. I've tried running the game normally with UAC off but still don't see ping values. They only seem to appear when running as admin.

Need to run the logitech goodies with elevated privileges too - one of the reasons running things using 'run as' functionality sux.

You could just enable your real admin account, play it from there.

Any suggestions to make it ALL work? Could there be a port that needs to be opened in Win7 Firewall to allow ping values to pass? Perhaps a rule that needs to be created? I've allowed all the access I know how to allow to BC2, but no help. What could be the difference in the running enviroment for BC2 between running as admin and normal?

Yes. I put a suite of debugging and analysis tools on this one night, I got curious. I found the problem, sent the info to DICE, so they have all they need to know about why it happens and how to fix it. It was a journeyman programming mistake, I'm sure they'll patch it. And no, from Vista up, there's nothing you can do other than elevate the privilege of the game to fix this. Some users did have firewall issues, a couple had ISPs blocking stuff, so if running as admin is no joy, then those should be looked at. There is a fix for XP, but I consider it to be a security hole, I'd rather DICE fix the code. N.B. - I am talking about the 'no pings at all' problem. The browser usually won't show pings for all servers, even with the work-around:It appears it only waits for so long to get data, then moves on.

bfheroes_web.Skitskraj wrote:Oh, I thought noone saw the ping.
And yea, I can't add favorites either (unless it's supposed to take forever). And the PB filter bug is extremely annoying, was gonna make a thread about that aswell, but guess they know about it already then.

Not sure about Ping, but I could NEVER add Favorites until a few days ago. I tried this and *IT WORKED*

I have to double check, it may also populate the Ping column for all the servers listed.

Solution -- when you go to Multiplayer Browser, check the 'Not Empty' 'Not Full' boxes and ALSO use the 'Pull Down' menus to further filter the Server List. For example, choose 'Rush' for the game mode and 'Nelson Bay' as the map.

By doing it this way, I was then able to add Favorite Servers. Not sure, but seems like since there was less data for the system to process, it was able to handle adding the Favorites.

Yeah, I'm hoping the patch fixes "favourites" a bit, too: I add a server to favorites, half the time it appears grayed out, always, even though I know it's active and has openings. Anyone else figure out why some servers show up grayed out in the list of favorites, even though they're valid? I found out that deleting a favorite or two that was grayed would make other favorites appear, but I haven't figured out the rule. I suspect it's some special character in the server names that's causing this problem. Ideas, anyone?

Well, it seems we have the trifecta. Pings appear, Logitech software works properly, and with Vamp9190's input on saving favorites, the game has most of it's propsed functionality. The rest I'm sure will be worked out in time by DICE.

Thank you very much heycarnut and Vamp9190. I don't know of your gentlemanly credentials, but scholars seems to be true enough.

And if I may, I'd like to add that in Win7, one can go to the installation folders and set the program to RaA automatically by right clicking BFBC2Game.exe /properties/compatability/ check "Run As Adminstrator" box. I've done this with SetPointII as well so that it RaA's when my comp is started.

bfheroes_web.Skitskraj wrote:Yea sorry, I drifted semi-offtopic. No need to start a forum war about it, get ingame and have a shoot out instead =)

Still, the ping doesn't show despite admin rights most of the time. Anyone know anything else that might be the cause?

Edit: Further, when I can see the ping, it's only on about 10% of all servers, the rest still has a "-".

Same problem here, using WinXP and bought a Steam version of the game.