Any tips on getting people to play together in a squad on Battlefield 2 (or 2142)?

Question

I'm tired of joining servers and swapping around in squads looking for other people who want to stick together and play as a team. In my experience, just one good squad can win the whole round while everyone else is fighting over getting in planes and choppers. I'm about to give up and just start forming squads and trying to lead, but I really just want people to play together. Are there any tips for making this happen?

Answer

I can only provide you with some suggestions;

1. Try to find servers that are focused specifically on team work, search for these on Google or websites dedicated to Battlefield multiplayer.
2. Contact players whom you've played with that have an interest in team work like yourself and play together frequently on the same server. This is often easier if you know the players i.e. work colleagues, friends etc.
3. Do try and lead, You can often surprise yourself with how well you can organise things with complete strangers. If you do a job that involves managing different people e.g. emergency services worker, then you will already have the skills to do this. If you are not then doing this can still be very beneficial because it will give you an outlet to practise and improve your communication and logistical skills.

Hope this helps.

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How do you perform really tight manuevers with a plane in BF2?

Question

I've given up trying to fly a plane in BF2 because it seems that everyone else can turn about twice as tightly as I can. I have a good joystick, but I just can't keep up. I see people from the ground making loop-the-loops within something like 10-plane-length diameters, and I have no idea how they can do that. Is there some trick to setting up the joystick to enable insane maneuverability?

Answer

The key to performing tight turns in any aeroplane is to reduce your speed. This will reduce the distance your plane must travel to turn. This technique is essential to effective dogfighting.

Hope this helps.

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Problems with playing Battlefield 2 where “My Documents” are not in the default location

Question

I am having a problem with Battlefield 2 in where I recieve a error popup on game start (after the intro menus):

LOCERROR_Unable to open current profile.

I think this is down to the fact my documents area is stored on my home server, instead of the C:\Users\%username%\Battlefield 2 expected location. If I start the game on a local (i.e no network documents) account I can start and play the game fine, creating a local account. I can then copy the "Battlefield 2" folder created in that accounts documents and place it in My Documents which removes the error show above, but when I try to start a mulitplayer or singleplayer game the game crashes with a black screen back to the desktop.

It seems to be a fairly common problem and I have found many references in EA and other forums, although no definitve answer (and the appearance of the evil "I found what the problem was but I'm not going to post it here").

Is there a way, using symlinks or junction points in Windows 7 to get this to work? I've thought about manually creating a "My Documents" Folder on the C:\ drive but am unsure if this will work.

Game Info: Battlefield 2, Updated to 1.50. No Mods, although Sandbox had the same problem. The computer is more than capeable of running the game.

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Edit: I've check the registry settings and while there is a "InstallDir" entry which points to the correct place there are no settings that detail a userprofile. As an interesting note, it's possible to copy your Battlefield 2 folder to a USB/Portable Hard disk and run it from that (although it's slow to start up initally).

Using a network share or drive mappings makes no difference (eg \filesvr\tom$\My Docs or N:\My Docs). Even changing it to a different partition on the same computers disk gives grief.

There is a folder created in the Battlefield 2 root directory with the name of my file server and some profile settings created in that.

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Edit 2

After a clean install of Windows 7 onto a spare machine over the weekend and using the excellent Everything search tool I have found that profile details have also been saved in:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\EA Games\Battlefield 2\[fileserver]\userstore$\[username]

...so I'll try poking around with these files and symlinking/robocopying them to where they should be. Hopefully the end is in sight.

Answer

From this thread it seems you have a few options you could try:

1. Redirect My Documents so it points to your homeserver using its IP-address like this: \\192.168.0.252\Data\Documents. In the BF2 folder there should now be a profile using the IP-address above. Note that BF2 can only read this info, it will not write it to dics. So you will need to edit the files by hand.

2. Redirect My Documents to something with 1 or more subfolders, which means a simple redirect to H:\ would not be enough. In the example My Documents is pointing to "H:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents".

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