Punkbuster, what are you good for?

A

Acoustique

Gawd
Joined
Nov 1, 2007
Messages
941
Honestly

Trying to play FEAR combat and all i get PB_INIT errors while some hacker was running around the level with some super hack shotgun thingy that shot 1000s of bullets a second.

I can think of sooo times where it just kicks you for no reason in other games, whilst the cheating continues

So what is it good for??

If you spend 2 years coding a game you can spend some time making it cheat-proof instead of relying on some 3rd party software to doo all the work for you.
 
Anyone remember playing TFC like 6-7(?) years ago with punkbuster running in matches, good times..

I havent had any recent experience with it though
 
Yea, Punkbuster blows, all it does is create a hassle with legitimate non cheaters (I'm referencing the BF 2142 issues and all the shit PB caused) while the people that are hacking, PB never even detects them!

PB is a worthless piece of shit.
 
Acoustique said:
Honestly

Trying to play FEAR combat and all i get PB_INIT errors while some hacker was running around the level with some super hack shotgun thingy that shot 1000s of bullets a second.

I can think of sooo times where it just kicks you for no reason in other games, whilst the cheating continues

So what is it good for??

If you spend 2 years coding a game you can spend some time making it cheat-proof instead of relying on some 3rd party software to doo all the work for you.
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They are all useless anyway. To stop cheating, they need too change the way to program their game. They don't work for fun, they do games for money. If they can make money out of anti-cheat, they will do it.

PB work well if you set up your computer correctly and your firewall. Yes sometimes it can piss you off because you need to setup port and update but most of the time it work well.

Look at steam and valve, it's the same problem. The amount of cheaters is ridiculous btw, if cheating legality was decided by democracy, I bet it would be legit in cs:s :rolleyes:
 
There is, unfortunately, no replacement for active server admins. PB is a nice concept but it's just a complete piece of shit. Every game that is "protected" by PB that I've played has had cheaters in it. If VAC was updated more regularly I think it would be more effective.
 
dotK said:
There is, unfortunately, no replacement for active server admins. PB is a nice concept but it's just a complete piece of shit. Every game that is "protected" by PB that I've played has had cheaters in it. If VAC was updated more regularly I think it would be more effective.
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QFT. The best servers that I've played in are the ones where there is usually an admin active and most likely participating in the game. It's much more effective than having PB trying to monitor a game because it fails to pick out even the obvious cheaters....:rolleyes:
 
yea it banned me in bf2 for running spyder2 a lcd calibration program. VIDEO HACK

but I see aimbots and things in games that it can't detect.
I went to the hack sites to see and all of them say 100% pb undetectable. and it true :(



I have also said many times it was way funny that In AA official tournaments then didn't use PB but another program.
BUT FOR ONLINE scum like us its fine
 
evilcartman said:
QFT. The best servers that I've played in are the ones where there is usually an admin active and most likely participating in the game. It's much more effective than having PB trying to monitor a game because it fails to pick out even the obvious cheaters....:rolleyes:
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Server admins are most of the time the first to hack in their own server. Using server side cheats is very common.
 
dotK said:
There is, unfortunately, no replacement for active server admins. PB is a nice concept but it's just a complete piece of shit. Every game that is "protected" by PB that I've played has had cheaters in it. If VAC was updated more regularly I think it would be more effective.
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VAC ban a vast list of license sometimes. I never saw PB doing this. I think the games dev/owner just don't care about it.

I remember when PB was incorporated in rvs, I think it took like 5 days before I started to see the hackers coming out of their lame hole.
 
punkbuster should also work in a way that it collects random screenshots from lots of players, and then an admin can go through them later on, check for cheating and ban via the unqiue ID they get from their CDKEY.

could it work like this instead of PB deciding for itself?
 
COD4 is that first game that I have used PB with, and I haven't had too many problems. I was getting a few errors and was booted a few times; apparently I wasn't supposed to have both the pb...A and pb...B processes running at once.:confused: Since I removed that I haven't had any problems.
 
Acoustique said:
punkbuster should also work in a way that it collects random screenshots from lots of players, and then an admin can go through them later on, check for cheating and ban via the unqiue ID they get from their CDKEY.

could it work like this instead of PB deciding for itself?
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It used to work that way back in the CS days, long ago. There were workarounds developed for it too, like a cheat that would automatically turn its features off for a short duration when PB requested a SS. Maybe if it was coded properly this could be preventable... maybe. The aimbots I have seen for games like CS now don't require custom models or anything of that nature and you can often trigger it on and off by pressing a button, which would make screenshot detection rather challenging.
 
Acoustique said:
punkbuster should also work in a way that it collects random screenshots from lots of players, and then an admin can go through them later on, check for cheating and ban via the unqiue ID they get from their CDKEY.

could it work like this instead of PB deciding for itself?
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Understand one thing: Everything can be hack with the current games.
They can caught cheaters on a regular basic and ban them like valve was doing in the past. They also did it in world of warcraft. But to do this, they always need to work on their anti-cheat system. Why don't they do it? I don't know, maybe it cost too much.


There is only one thing that cannot be hacked and may work only for wallhacking. It's in the way they make their games, nobody ever did it. If their games was made in a special way, wallhacking would be 100% impossible. But they told me it would take too much cpu time for the servers and it require *all* servers to be hosted on the game-developer server like for bf2 stats servers.
 
I don't even know what punkbuster is or does I just know that I was downloading a ton and had 4 computers running BF2 on a dsl line and all 4 of us got punkbustered for high ping.

It's good for that keep the 56k ers out.
 
Even Steam's VAC is a joke...the only sure way to be protected from hackers and cheaters is to play on a server where it is actively run by admins that kick them when caught. They should be added to a master ban list IMO.
 
stevedave said:
I don't even know what punkbuster is or does I just know that I was downloading a ton and had 4 computers running BF2 on a dsl line and all 4 of us got punkbustered for high ping.

It's good for that keep the 56k ers out.
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Punkbuster can kick for bad language or ping, it's up to the admin. You are not punkbusted when it kick you for that.
 
Punkbuster's always been wank. Caused lockups with my last motherboard, loads of issues with BF2142, and always kicks for something trivial just as i'm starting to enjoy a round of CoD4. More to the point, it'll let all but the most rudimentary cheat programs run jolly as you like, so if anything we'd be better off without it altogether.
 
Gruntled Employee said:
Even Steam's VAC is a joke...the only sure way to be protected from hackers and cheaters is to play on a server where it is actively run by admins that kick them when caught. They should be added to a master ban list IMO.
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seems to work for me. the only cheaters i see are the ones using exploits for a week before they get patched.
 
Absolutely nothing!

I was playing in a CoD4 server a few nights ago - with killcam running - and there were 2 guys (nicks dilbert & tilbert) that were obvioulsy, and I mean obviously walling, plus a thrid that had an aimbot that was swinging him up to 100 degrees for 2-shot headshots. It was stunningly blatant. The wallers were toggling once the chorus against them began to pick up until they got picked off 1 or 2 times - very quickly. I stuck around to see if the vaunted PB would do anything other than cause random audio freezes on my machine but after another hour they were still there, going strong.

For contrast back in the CAL BF1942 competition days when Dice added PB to the game it did completly mess up the lead, but I'll be damned if competition wasn't on a suspiciously even scale for a couple of weeks. I was on a middle of the road team and we suddenly started winning - decisively - aginst previously top tier teams. It didn't last but it sure made you stop and think.
 
You can't make things cheat proof, theres always updates to hacks that get around hack protection, punkbuster is updated reguarly and so helps overcome this problem by finding newer hacks and removing them.

I however dislike punkbuster, I think running as a service all the time is a load of bullshit and it's always had issues, I've had to install new copies of PB manually so many times in the past I've just stopped playing the games it was protecting. SoF2 was one of those.
 
There will never be something 100% cheat proof. PB does do a decent job at catching a lot of early on cheaters using less advanced methods. But it is only a file/process scanner and it cannot detect everything!

The ideas most of you are saying involves a lot of human man power that needs to be paid to do the job...not very economical when you have thousands of servers and players online everyday in a free service like the online from steam or EA.

Also, anything and everything will be hacked. Heck even consoles are hacked and they have a completely closed system. Remember the Xbox was hacked by people listening in on the data pathways on the mainboard and modifying them to hack into the box. Very very advanced stuff that a few hardcore hackers do and find out...then release easy guides and installers for every kid and his cousin to install on their box.
 
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