EA just announced the first ever double XP weekend for a Battlefield game: Battlefield 3 will be getting a double XP weekend from May 12 to 14 2012, where all points scored will be doubled.
The double XP weekeend starts at 12:01 AM PST tonight.
Double XP weekends have been run by many games over the years, including for many Call of Duty and Halo titles. It’s essentially a way of boosting player numbers for a short period of time by offering incentives. The Battlefield 3 double XP weekend will be live on all platforms.

Update 2012-05-12
NOTICE PC players: Apologies for delay in your 2XP event. To give you a full weekend as planned, we're rescheduling this for May 26-27

A new pack of screenshots from the Close Quarters map Donya Fortress. Donya Fortress is one of 4 maps as part of the Close Quarters DLC, which will be released in June. Screenshots after the break.

Donya Fortress screenshots - Battlefield 3

With the release of the new trailer, EA released a Close Quarters fact sheet as well.
The fact sheet includes much of what we already know about Close Quarters, but it also includes a full list of the 10 new weapons in the DLC. The list:
- AUG Assault Rifle
- SCAR Assault Rifle
- ACW-R Carbine
- MTAR-21 Carbine
- M417 Sniper Rifle
- JNG-90 Sniper Rifle
- L86LSW Machine Gun
- LSAT Machine Gun
- MP5K Tactical Machine Pistol
- SPAS-12 Shotgun
There are a couple of old favorites on that list from Bad Company 2 and other Battlefield games, mainly the Steyr AUG, FN SCAR, and the SPAS-12 shotgun.
The new Close Quarters weapons will be unlocked the same way Back To Karkand weapons were unlocked: through in-game “Assignments”.

The latest game server update has completed internal QA, and has been sent out to all the RSP companies. They are doing small-scale testing of it during the evening.

If no problems are reported by the RSPs, then the companies will gradually roll it out over the next few days, starting at 10:00 UTC on Thursday Apr 19th.

This update is addressing some gameplay bugs that have been reported since the latest big client+server update. Also, there are some minor improvements to the RCON interface.

The master servers will remain available; Battlelog will remain available.

Changelist
* Fixed AA missiles not doing damage to vehicles moving at very high speeds
* Fixed TV Missile doing much more damage than it should (it is no longer a 1-hit kill)
* Tweaked tank armor strength
* MAV elevatoring fix, round 2; proning on the MAV will now disable it
* RCON admin.say command can send to individual players
* A few invalid map+gamemode combinations in maplist.txt could crash the server on startup; these combinations are now rejected instead
* RCON vars.serverDescription was not returning anything in R20 if the string was not set; this has been changed to return “” instead
* RCON player.onChat now reports the target player subset

Battlefield 3′s Battlelog will be getting a new feature : the ability to see live scoreboards before joining a server.
Many players have experienced joining a game, only to find out that the round is almost over.
Or worse, to be met with a message “You team lost”.

DICE has now rolled out Live scoreboards to all players on Battlelog.
You can now see the progress of a match, how many tickets are left, the player scores and so on, before joining a match.