HELP, I'VE BEEN KICKED!

Or, why am I always getting kicked?

First of all, I don't want to or have time to babysit anyone, especially 24/7/365 days a year, and so I don't personally kick anybody. If you get kicked, the server is kicking you, not me.

I've written a very sophisticated computer program to do this, and it does an amazingly good job of it. In fact, I would say my kicker program is probably the best of any in the world, period, and it sets my servers miles above the rest. Its why the best players are always on my server and the action is intense. There are other modded servers in the world, but only mine with my fantastic dog pile kicker.

To handle the endless ocean of douchebags and fools out there, and there is indeed an ocean of them, my automated kicker program kicks the garbage out the bottom to make way for better players who actually want to play the game. It will suffer fools for a while, maybe even a lot longer if the server is empty. Irregardless, everyone gets at least 12 minutes to play, but if you act retarded, or if you can't cut it and the server gets full, you will get pushed out the bottom to make for better ones to come in at the top.

100% of the kicks happen for the following reasons, and they are incredibly simple to understand.

Reason #1 You kill someone without a knife in the knife only area

On BF2142, the knife only area is inside the circle of the core flag/silo capture area in the center of the map.
While I consider this location controversial, because people who don't know about it will try and fight over this
control point as normal and end up getting kicked, on the Sidi Map this location makes sense for a Knife arena.
It's in the dead center of the map, and ordinarily this silo/flag gets fought over the least of all.
So it makes the most dull control point actually interesting. I call it the 'Thunderdome', like from the movie 'Mad Max'.



In BF2, the knife only area is inside the tiled area of the pool beneath the crane in the center of the map.
This swimming pool is never used for anything and is in the center of the maps, so its a very good arena location.
Its borders are well defined, and you can safely stand around the pool and watch and chose when to enter.
Plus its funny to drive jeeps and tanks into it. Two men enter, only one man leaves.
If someone gets killed with a knife, the server will announce "Shark Kill in the Pool!"

Reason #2 You're Teamkilling

Reason #3 You truely suck

Reason #4, The server is full and you're the worst player on it

Reason #5, Your Ping is too high, or you're Idle

This is rare, but if your connection is bad or you are running torrents at the same time, your ping will plummet, and if it stays above 500 for more than 2 minutes you will get booted off the server. The reason being, it slows down play for all the other players. You can check your ping by holding down TAB to see the scoreboard; your ping is listed next to your name and is typically in the range of 50 to 250.

If you're idle, and your soldier hasn't moved in 3 minutes, and the system is full the system will kick you to free a player slot for someone else who wants to play. The system kicks idle players before it kicks bad players, a bad player who is moving about is better to have on the server than someone who is not even there at all.

Getting kicked, is not getting banned

Remember, if you get kicked, you can try to reconnect. Sometimes the server will remember your horrible score, and not let you back on until the next game starts. Sometimes it won't, and you'll get lucky and it will let you back on. If it won't, just wait for the next game. Its no big deal. If you play the game half way the way its suppose to be played, you'll very, very rarely ever get kicked.

Getting banned is something else, and not something you want to do. To get banned, I have to do it personally; its rare, and for the most part I only ban someone if they are running hacks, aimbots, being a complete douchebag, glitching, or otherwise really trying to screw things up or threaten the server.

Note that server admins share ban lists. So if you've banned on one server, its very possible your name has been passed around and you get banned on the rest.

There is generally no appeal for (real) bans.

On a rare occasion, the server will glitch and say you're banned, when you haven't (really) been. Just wait for the next game, or the next time the server reboots, and it should clear up. Sometimes the server will start banning everyone for no apparent reason and empty the server. I did not write the banmanager, so I am still tracking down this bug. The only thing you can do in such a case is wait for me to reset the server.

Big tip: Avoid playing on the weekends

Play at night! And play on week days instead of weekends, to avoid the weekend warrior crush. During the day, and *especially* on the weekends when all the part time player weekend warrior noobz try to crowd into the server, your chances of the server being full and you getting kicked for being a poor player go way up. People are mobbish and stupid, and just like traffic, you want to be in the know and avoid this traffic jam.

However, all through the night, and typically on the weekdays, you can play for hours on end as long as you want and never get kicked, and there's still plenty of players on the server for it to be fun. There's always someone to play against as players connect from Europe, the United States, Japan, and Australia, and what might be night for you, may be the middle of the afternoon for them.

I don't play on the weekends myself, I let the weekend warriors have their space. I know the hardcore players are the ones who play all week long, and those are the ones I want to sharpen my skills against. The big secret is, it only takes two or three hardcore players on one server to make it an awesomely intense game. If you're hardcore like me, those are the ones you are smashing heads against. All the lesser players are just background noise to pad your score.

The mob mentality assumes having more players on a server makes for a great server, and so amateur players always all try to crunch into a server that is already the fullest. This is stupid quantity vs quality thinking. On the contrary, it only takes only two awesome players to make an awesome game and all the noobz in the world will not make an awesome game. Only if you are an intermediate player will you find it satisfying to endlessly kill an ocean of noobz to pad your ego. The real hardcore personalities raise the action level all over the map; they search the enemies and each other out with a vengeance, and go toe to toe against other big personalities. If you want to sharpen your playing, you want to be on the server with and when the best players are there.