There is a new Chinese “master” server hosted at gameppy.com. You can think of it as a Chinese version of BF2Hub – the dominant platform for Battlefield 2 players. Unfortunately, gameppy used the same range of player ids as BF2Hub. As a server admin, their players seemed to be (poorly) impersonating (“spoofing”) BF2Hub players – same player id, different name. Unaware of gameppy or the player id collisions, BF2Hub server admins kept banning gameppy players from their servers. Something needed to change.
Looking at the analytics one day, I noticed bf2.cx gets a lot of Chinese visitors looking at the primary server for players using gameppy accounts: China #1 standalone server. Because I had no other means of contacting the gameppy admins, I added a banner to the top of the page for that specific server. In essence, the banner pointed out the issue as well as the solution for it and asked the admins to contact me for details.
Today, about two weeks after adding the banner, I received an email from one of the gameppy admins. They noticed the banner on bf2.cx and changed the player ids both for existing and future players. I immediately looked at the player list. And indeed, players I definitely saw with BF2Hub-looking player ids before used new, unique, non-conflicting gameppy ids.
