We have enabled Global Forceclassing (FC) on honor bearing servers. Individual FC can still be used but not on honor servers. Using a Global FC on everyone levels the playing field for all. When using Global FC, honor is accrued at less than normal rates due to the fact that old maps were created with specific weapon loadouts in mind. Forceclassed Servers will show up in MBS with an (FC) preceding their name for easy identification.

USERNAMES

Spaces in user account names are no longer permitted. If you have an old account with a space it has been replaced with an underscore character (_) or in the case of conflicts a number. You should have received an email to your address of record indicating the change. All of your other account information was retained.

BAN SYSTEM

Ban system again supports banning by IP, MAC, or Name/PBGUID (for PB servers banning by NAME will result in a PBGUID ban instead of a name ban). Ban system now supports console commands to list ban lists in sets of 20 (or so) to allow "scrolling" through the list to locate banned players. The Admin Command Post only supports showing the first 100 ban entries but now has a wider list to show all the ban details. The Banning system was rewritten and includes the preliminary ability to download a ban list from a web server on game server startup.
The following INI section can be added to support this:
[Engine.BanManagement]
BanListMasterServer=www.somedomain.com
BanListWebPath=/AA2831BanList
This will cause the game server to try to retrieve the "BanList.status" file
from the web server using the URL: www.somedomain.com/AA2831BanList/BanList.status (using the example above) which will be compared to the local version to see if the ban list file version matches. The BanList.status file contains the following lines:
AABanListMasterServer
Version=
MD5=
If the version does not match (regardless as to whether it's newer or older) the remote BanList.txt file is downloaded from the web server. It is not recommended to use this for large ban lists. It is anticipated this ban list management system will be expanded in future versions of America's Army.

PLAYER ADMINS

Player Admin support has been rewritten to require player administrators to have passwords. The new AASM provides support for creating the appropriate format PlayerAdmin entries. For those wishing to manually edit their INI file the PlayerAdmin setting is now in the format "PlayerAdmin=, " (e.g. "PlayerAdmin=Bob,mysecretpassword"). Player Admins wanting to join the server must join the server using either the MBS browser and right-clicking on the server name (with it selected) and choosing "Join As Player Admin" or by joining via the console using this format "open ?PAPassword="
(e.g. "open 192.168.0.1?PAPassword=mysecretpassword"). You must have logged into your account in order to use this functionality on any official or authorized server.

Sorry all - additions to the README that didn't make it into the text file....

DEMOREC
The demorec system was modified to address issues encountered with certain sound cards and the recording of weapon firing noises and muzzle flashes. Users with specific sound cards would experience audio stuttering and degraded game performance when creating demo recordings. To address this for 2.8.3.1 the "DemoRecToggleSound" and "DemoRecToggleMuzzleFlash" console commands (and associated INI entries) were added. If you experience audio distortion while using demorec to record a play session disable the recording of the weapon firing sounds and muzzle flashes and performance should return to normal. You will still see muzzle flashes and hear weapon noises in game, but they won't be available when playing back the demo recording.

To disable recording of muzzle flashes and weapon firing sounds you may wish to edit the user.ini file and add in the following lines to the [AGP.HumanController] section:

bDemoRecSounds=false
bDemoRecMuzzleFlash=false

AA LOADER
We added the ability to quickly update Punkbuster. From the AA Loader you can update PB before entering the game. The game itself will also check for updates as before for those who do not wish to use this feature.