Battlefield 2 stats sped up

The team behind multiplayer first-person shooter Battlefield 2, released in Europe last Friday, has increased the speed with which game results and stats are reflected on the web, a spokesperson told an online forum this week - to resounding approval.

Following the game's release in the US in the middle of last week, EA reps admitted that stats updates were "taking about half a day to be reflected within BFHQ," and vowed to sort it out with developer DICE and technology partner GameSpy.

But according to EA's Ben Sawyer, aka "Die Fledermaus", speaking on the Total BF2 forums, the team's now been able to catch up on processing. "It should now take no more than five minutes for score and rank updates to be reflected in each player's BFHQ," he wrote, promising more info on "worldwide Ranked Server status" soon.

Battlefield 2, which is a bit good anyway, follows in the footsteps of games like Unreal Tournament and Halo 2 in allowing Statto-like players to analyse their own performance in depth using this sort of feedback.

Suggestions that it only lists casualty data relating to the US Marines are thought to be rampantly xenophobic and fairly offensive. Sorry.