Battlefield Veteran: Part 1

I've attempted to obtain veteran status for Battlefield, but at the moment this is still unsuccessful.

Lately I've been playing Bad Company 2, but haven't played Battlefield 2 in a long while.

I linked my old BF2 login with my new EA account.

Then I played the Battlefield Heroes online game. BF Heroes installs through a Firefox extension and launches through the browser. It was fairly quick to download and easy to play.

Last night the veteran site didn't show any of my statistics, but after maintenance this morning, my stats are showing but without veteran status. Neither the BF2 or Heroes games are showing on the account, only BC2 (although these all show in my EA profile page)

So I decided to play BF2 since I still have it installed.

But I don't have a CD/DVD drive at the moment, and the game requires the disc.

But I did find a workaround. There is a torrent for a Battlefield 2 mini disc image that is only 4MB (downloads fast despite the few seeders). Loading this image with Daemon tools lite allowed the game to start.

Third time was the charm when I attempted to join a game.

The login was slow each time it was "connecting to account server", took about 2 minutes.

On my first attempt I tried just joining a random game.

After loading to 100% and joining the game, the screen went blue (no not that blue screen) and I had to kill it.

On my second attempt, I tried to select a game (with again the slow login)

I found only 8 servers listed, and of those only 2 had a decent number of players.

This time it crashed while the game was loading.

On the third attempt, I chose a random game again and got in successfully to a server in Germany.

I only played this one game. My team lost and I died 3x more than kills, but I got decent point and was the best medic.