January 15th, my birthday, I got Battlefield 3. It’s a great game, though I generally suck at first person shooters. It might’ve had something to do with the games I played while being a kid. While everybody was playing Counterstrike or Operation Delta Force, I was stuck playing innocent racing games like Infogrames’ GP2, due to parental control. It wasn’t that bad, I’m now able to kick almost anyones ass no matter which racing game. But, I didn’t develop the skill needed to play first person shooters on a higher level.

The first real online first person shooter experience I got, was playing Halo 3 and Team Fortress 2 on the Xbox. I accidentally scratched my Halo 3 disc and Team Fortress 2 died out on the Xbox. Then, I started playing Team Fortress 2 on my PC, after upgrading it with some nice parts. This was the first *real* first person shooter experience I got, because quite frankly, an FPS should be played on the PC with a mouse and keyboard.

After about 300 hours of play, I got better. Kill/Death-ratio up to 1:1. But, it kind of got boring. It’s a great game, but I can’t play for more than an hour. That’s why I wanted something new. Nowadays, if you want to play a ‘grown-up’ FPS, you really only have two options: Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3. I decided to go with the former, so on that day, january 15th, I got Battlefield 3 as a present.

I played, I died. I played some more. I died some more. I decided to PTFO, which is Battlefield 3 language for ‘Play The Fucking Objective’, and seemed to get better at it, while raking up some kills. Then, on the 23rd of January, I got kicked from the server. Punkbuster had somehow blacklisted me. I tried to look the problem up; how could a sucky player like me get banned by anti-cheat software?

Turns out, Punkbuster, an obsolete anti-cheat software programm, had been hacked. Hackers had free acces to Punkbuster, and could ban everyone they wanted. It took some time for EA and DICE to acknowledge the problem. Then, they couldn’t decide who was to blame: Punkbuster’s developer EvenBalance or DICE. Somehow it took them four days of figuring out the problem.

Four days, which I could’ve spent playing Battlefield. Four days honing my skills. No. Even the servers which didn’t use PunkBuster, would kick me out automatically.

Today, I finally got to play Battlefield 3 again. I sucked.