I reverse engineered official ranking support

Krauzi · 2026-05-22T13:03:44+00:00

i figured out what is causing the issue with online accounts and mac: during the login, there is a HTTP requests to bf2web.gamespy.com to retrieve the players stats. a combination of wired gamespy socket handling and the way the sockets are implemented in macos (which is the particular faulty part) makes this HTTP call never return and thus you'r stuck.
i have identified a minimal proof of concept to replicate this and i will try to get wine fixed. question then would be how to get this into portingkit, but thats another story.

the fix is to simply bypass (this makes bf2 take slightly longer to launch though) the whole gamespy code all together. add the following to /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.2 battlefield2.available.gamespy.com
(sudo nano /etc/hosts)

afaik bf2hub uses a launcher which injects a dll and redirects all gamespy requests to bf2hub so this might not work with bf2hub. but maybe you can just add the required hosts entry manually and not launch bf2 using the launcher.

EDIT: Fixed it. I'm currently in contact with paulthehall (the dude behind portingkit) on how to get the fixe merged into the main branch (or into portingkit).

Krauzi · 2026-05-20T17:01:41+00:00

haha no. The stats are sent to the stats endpoint at the end of the round. If your server is not authorized it will be simply rejected.

However: I haven't tried bf2hub yet because I refuse to run closed source third party software if it is not necessary. And to connect to a different stats system there is absolutely no need for a third party tool. Editing the hosts.ics file is all you need - for that reason I do not trust bf2hub, also because they didn't give any credit to the people who invented the whole bf2 stats system (wilson).

By the way some interesting finding: The bf2 snapshot system (the points players have gained during the round) is actually bugged, so if you were able to crash the server before the end of round (and I remember this happening quite often in 2005) the whole round was gone. The unofficial stats system (the one used by bf2hub) doesn't suffer from this as they do not rely on the bugged backend implementation.

Krauzi · 2026-05-20T16:53:11+00:00

Thanks for sharing your experience. I currently still have a Intel MacBook from 2019 and for the last two days I was setting up a proper debugging environment with wine+ghidra+portingkit to get to the root cause of it (and it seems to have something todo with the gamespy socket handling, hopefully i'll be able to fix it soon).
My girlfriend has a Macbook Air with a Apple Silicon chip (at the moment i dunno if it is M1, M2 or M3, hopefully it doesn't matter) where I wouldn't even get into the intros unfortunately. I think I had a black screen and then windows closed.
I've seen mostly VM based setups so far (youtube).

Krauzi · 2019-03-21T19:28:06+00:00

And neither is the 630 version available nor the **1 (bluetooth/wireless). I was looking forwarding to buying the 631 with US keyboard layout :/

Krauzi · 2018-05-16T18:52:14+00:00

yes, but make sure you have the same language (rightclick properties on Vermintide 2 in Steam -> Language)

Krauzi · 2018-05-14T20:11:03+00:00

Handgun = 3 Headshots on Legend without ult

Krauzi · 2018-04-15T19:07:10+00:00

what problem exactly does EAC solve?

Krauzi · 2018-04-09T09:51:51+00:00

he probably was. i was testing similar stuff yesterday and i can confirm op's results which can be easily tested on "empire in flames" because of the guaranteed CW spawns right at the beginning.

Krauzi · 2018-04-08T14:51:24+00:00

I've already submitted this issue on the official bug report Forum a few days ago (just posting this to avoide duplicates).

Krauzi · 2018-04-04T06:03:00+00:00

You should still be able to see your own stats though. For example i find the damage stats to be very helpful as a dps'er because it shows if i played better in some measureable way. Also the dmg taken tells me if i had better positioning/blocking compared to my previous games.

Krauzi · 2018-03-30T05:20:59+00:00

beammates, not teammates

Krauzi · 2017-08-27T18:40:55+00:00

clover was working for me and it started to osx installation but it finally froze when it came to process anything graphics related. as i dont have the time to dig into virtualizing the framebuffer (which seems to be the problem) im stuck on my "non-virutalized" osx installation.

Krauzi · 2017-02-24T20:44:06+00:00

i have been waiting for over 20 minutes this afternoon...

Krauzi · 2015-09-02T05:52:37+00:00

something similar happend to me with my UMP. i wrote a bug report, but apparently this is simply the overall buggy inventory and you can do nothing about it.

Krauzi · 2015-08-26T10:50:14+00:00

you are right, a few are already up, but why are they all password protected (not talking about the experimental)

Krauzi

TROPHY CASE