DICE have released Server Update R9 with the following changes:

- Support for unranked servers (vars.unranked)

- Unranked servers allow changing of all settings

- Reintroduced vars.allUnlocksUnlocked for unranked servers

- The game server will parse all of Startup.txt even if an error is encountered

- vars.roundStartPlayerCount / vars.roundRestartPlayerCount handling rewritten to be more natural

- vars.maxPlayers cannot be used to go past the server's max number of slots any more

- Security updates to the game server

- Fixed several server crashes, hangs, and a 10-second stall - all of which would make the server drop every player

- vars.gamePassword can only be invoked during server startup, not while the server is already running

- vars.teamKillCountForKick 0 will disable team kicking instead of kicking people frivolously

- banList.add would sometimes crash; fixed now

- EOD bot scoring exploit fix

R9 is scheduled for release today, Tuesday 22nd at 07:30 GMT in coordination with the client side update.

Battlelog will be down for maintenance between 07:00 - 09:00 GMT (ish) during which we'll take the opportunity to update all BF3 game servers to the latest release.