Welcome to the Gibson BF2S Server
On April 14, 7PM PST I flipped the DNS switch and moved everything from my rental server to the new, BF2S owned server codenamed Gibson.
This move has entailed a LOT of work and been underway for over two months. It began for serveral reasons, the two most important being that I wanted FULL control and ownership of the hardware for this site and that the codebase for BF2S needed a major overhaul.
You can surf back a few news posts and learn more about this process, but today I'm going to focusing on letting you in on what's new here:
Super Important MUST READ info
The site NO LONGER USES NICKS -- ANYWHERE. You MUST use your PID number. Nicks were far, far, far too problematic and troublesome in the first version, and I'm not going to deal with that headache this time around. I show PID numbers all over the place, so finding yours should be pretty dang easy now.
The Homepage
You'll notice a few new -- and old -- things on the homepage. First of all, there is no more "find players" search field. I have consolidated this process as part of the "Get Stats" section. You can use this box now to find and lookup player stats.
Additionally, this box is now "live search" enabled -- as you type it will find player matching the string (or PID number) as you enter it in.
You can, of course, hit the "Get Stats" button to see a list of all players matching your search (up to 500 results now!) Wild card searching is not enabled at this point. Name completion is as far as it goes for the moment.
The "whats new in the forums" is also back and running (now that the homepage is on the same machine as the forums, this is possible again.)
Player Profile Pages
Some very, very important changes on this section. For starters, it's a "section" of the site now. Each player now has not one page, but THREE pages dedicated to them.
- Main profile page
- History
- Achievement
Main Player Profile
One nice thing (thanks to the new database structure) is that your page only shows stats relevant to you. Never played Sharqi?* It won't show up!
vs. 
(Few maps vs. Lots of maps)
- Additionally, awards that you are eligible for are now underlined. Just get the IAR reqs.
- I finally included parachute time into the stats.
- Hover over accuracies to see shots fired and shots that hit totals.
- Hover over the WLR in the top middle column. This will make you both happy and sad.
Player History Pages
A dedicated, and greatly expand section for exploring player performance and history.
The graphs are much updated addressing several concerns. First off, the primary graph no longer "skips" days. Your progress is graphed against calander days. Days with no data are left off the chart.
The two new charts are very important. The first I'll talk about is the graph on the right. This is the "Change" graph. It shows the absolute change between updates. Hovering over each bar will show you how much time passed (in game) and how much stat was earned (or lost!)
The second graph is very important. It shows you that, during one update to the next, the RATE at which you earned or lost that stat. You can apply this sentance to this graph:
"From the 8th of april to the 9th of april, I was doing 8 kill per hour."
This is amazing powerful because it shows your performance for a given span of time. This kind of information can be useful for tracking not just the upward trend of advancement, but how you are doing on a day to day basis. (It also has application is stat padding detection, but that's only apparent with a little more digging...)
Be warned, this section is still a little buggy (first four options: acc, spm, kdr, and wlr) and are very "flash intense" so, er, be warned. Heh.
Player Achievement Pages
This is a fun little experiment at this point. For the VERY hard core stat nerds, this is a dream come true. It's also very useful for those "NO BITCH MY STATS ARE BETTER" arguements since all of the stats present in this section are relitivistic.
Later on in the month I'll begin taking suggestions for other relativistic stats you'd like to see added to this page.
Backend and Queue
I've talked about this a few times and it's oh-so-techy, so I'll keep this brief: The new backend is killer -- to the point of being nearly 10-12 times faster in almost every aspect of operation. Load times are faster and most importantly the queue time is WAY faster. I've got it to where I can actually outpace EA's servers again -- even at full bore, it doesn't take a breather. This is very exciting.
Oh yeah the important part: 2 hour updates are back. We'll see how it holds up.
Leader boards
Nothing much different here -- just make sure to convert everyone on the list to PID numbers.
Menu
The "about" page was moved. Didn't seem needed taking up space there. Also, the FAQ now points to the proper Wiki FAQ
UBAR
UBAR has has a slight formatting change and now is showing all the updated award reqs. Some stuff is still off, I'm fairly certain though
"DAMN you talk alot..."
I swear, I'm done now. Go play -- let me know if breaks really badly. I'm going to be making sure the server doesn't catch on fire
* = Yeah right you lying son of a ...
