We were able to tweak our code to send messages to each player individually. Messages like rules about using vehicles, kits, rally points and commander assets, that currently are displayed at the top of the screen for all team members, will now be displayed only to the player that needs that information.
In the screenshot you can see a sequence of three actions that were responsible for those messages in my screen. First, I tried placing a bunker, but I didn't have the officer kit. So I requested it, getting the confirmation, and tried again, getting a new alert that I needed a build order from the commander.
We are using BF2's medals, badges and ribbons HUD events to send those messages. Basically we made the decision of removing support for these types of awards from the mod. They are just shiny awards that don't bring anything useful to the mod.
Servers that use stats systems will hopefully not have any problems since our code will try to disable these specific awards, but if a system is using a different method we can help them remove it from the in-game stats python code. Ranks and general stats can still be active, it's just those specific awards that are removed.
Notice that we will not be giving any medals, badges or ribbons to players all the time, we are just using the HUD events to display information, while the current stats of the players remain unaltered.
Servers that don't use any stats systems won't have anything to worry about.
The benefits added to the mod with this new message system are way more interesting than any problems we may have with stats, so we are really happy bringing this feature to BF2 that many thought it wasn't possible.
Now the only ones responsible for spam will be the servers with their messages (that we hope they put in longer intervals), game modes messages (that are really rare) and normal player chat.
We will give some tips on how to send player-specific messages in PR to anybody that wants to use the system in their custom scripts once the patch is released.
Jaymz