[citation][nom]jojesa[/nom]I don't have problems connecting to servers but a friend has the same issues you described. He has to start the game 2 or 3 times before been able to play.The hackers I hate them with passion, those ones that kill you thru walls, cannot be killed or those that are able to knife you while shooting at you.[/citation]
Yes, it takes several tries to get into a server. That "disconnected from EA online message" is very persistent. It's been a problem since day 1 with the game and on 2 different computers. With the new premium thing it's become impossible to play on populated servers due to constantly getting kicked back in the queue. All of my friends stopped playing the first quarter of this year and I haven't touched the game since either. It's just not fun. You can't communicate with people in game because they never implemented VOIP, there are no orders (no commander, poorly implemented squad orders) to give direction and teamwork to the game, and there are a ridiculous number of non-obvious hackers due to the lack of a spectate mode. You have to have a hack to know how many are truly doing it. There's one particular tool that can tell you when someone is looking at you and displays a percentage. There are a lot of people that jump from 0 to 100 unlike normal players that fluctuate -- the difference is obvious once you try the tools.
I really like BF2, but BF3 is just terrible. In BF2 we had neat things like custom maps, VOIP, co-op mod, vehicle mods, community-developed balance changes, private servers, and more. None of that is possible in BF3. The most glaring part of BF3 is that if you jump onto an empty server to play with a friend or perhaps practice with the aircraft it is possible that someone will notice and then DICE will ban you from all EA games as a result. This happened to myself and a friend in January. It took us over a week to get it sorted out because DICE banned our EA accounts locking out every non-BF3 EA game that used the accounts. We were accused of stat padding for trying to have fun with helicopters. A couple thousand 1v1 points was considered stat padding (it took tens of thousands to rank up), although this shortly before the shortcut packs were announced.
BF3 is a game that plays you. It's currently the worst game I ever paid full price for. I can't say it enough -- avoid BF3.