I have never had to use Punkbuster so BF2 is my first experiance with it ...

Is it just me or is Punkbuster simply a pesimistic approach to catching script kiddies? Which is fine (i suppose) if their service is perfect, but it is obvious that punkbuster has problems.

Disconnecting users because your 'hack' prevention software is homosexual is poor form.

Anybody like punk buster?

Yep, its been f***ing worthless for many years now.

Best thing we used to use is a program (can't remember what it's called) took a video of what you actually saw on screen i.e. everyone warring had the prog running on their own system. It took screenshots of only the centre portion of the screen once every few seconds or something and immediately converted it to a short mpeg. Everybody then sent it in to the ref and they were all checked. That way it's not some external prog checking your system or whatever but is seen as on screen. The only thing that got round it was somthing like using blutac on the screen for sniping.

octinium was the name.

Punkbuster is good for a couple of reasons. One is that each player has a unique id based off their CD key and punkbuster makes it really easy to ban them and manage the bans. Another is like what jD said - admins can take a screenshot of a player's client and have it uploaded to the server without the player knowing, and if there's hax then BAM they get banned by the admin. You can make it check the MD5 of specified files, check if client settings are within a certain range, all that kind of stuff.

It's pretty damn good from an admin point of view. It doesn't necessarily detect cheats and stuff by itself, I personally don't see it as being good for that, but I do see it as being good as a standard adminning tool for helping catch and ban cheaters.

If any admins read this: what's your opinion/experience of Cheating-Death (for HL)?

I loved the concept behind it. They really seemed to know what they were talking about and it didn't seem like a quick theoretical hack to get rid of cheaters. It seemed like an honest attempt at addressing hacks at a more suitable level.

The only issue I had was that upgrading could be a pain, when the servers you were trying to connect to were using a higher version than you, but you couldn't update thanks to the unitedadmins site being down.

the inital hdd thrashing that comes with punkbuster when you enter the game is extremely undesirable

Punkbuster is good for a couple of reasons. One is that each player has a unique id based off their CD key and punkbuster makes it really easy to ban them and manage the bans. Another is like what jD said - admins can take a screenshot of a player's client and have it uploaded to the server without the player knowing, and if there's hax then BAM they get banned by the admin. You can make it check the MD5 of specified files, check if client settings are within a certain range, all that kind of stuff.

It's pretty damn good from an admin point of view. It doesn't necessarily detect cheats and stuff by itself, I personally don't see it as being good for that, but I do see it as being good as a standard adminning tool for helping catch and ban cheaters.

If that is all it did then I wouldn't really care about punkbuster. At some point in every session I have played today, I have been disconnected by punkbuster. Once because my client failed to update itself, once because punkbuster couldn't detect any traffic coming from me, and once because of an error message.

It is this pesimistic and automatic approach to punishment that bugs me. By pesimistic I mean "something isn't right, lets just boot the player just to make sure.". There isn't any consideration that it is something between the player -> punk buster (or even punk busters overloaded servers), just "I hope you were not having a fun time *BOOT*".

If the servers noticed that you haven't been talking to punkbuster then maybe it should flag an admin, or maybe upload some shiznits to the server (like your screenshots). Maybe your server could pass on your punkbuster stats to the server. If your account seems suspect when you join, then maybe you could live with the ownage of punkbuster, while the rest of us just play on.

I don't know ... but something that doesn't punish players for a problem beyond their control, that should be the answer. Not punkbuster.

That being said, it seems to be clearing up this afternoon.

the inital hdd thrashing that comes with punkbuster when you enter the game is extremely undesirable

I assumed it was caching s***

Punkbuster always kicks me for having an "Empty Win32 Module List". It s***s me to tears. Down with PunkBuster, BOOO!!!

I got dropped out of a BF2 game last night because my Punkbuster had failed to update in 2 minutes or such..grrr..SO

I go over to the Punkbuster site and find this great little util, over here. Its called 'PBweb' and you simply put it in your PB directory of your Game Dir and run it, it will scan your files, find out which ones need updating and does it all for you, and not while your trying to get on that guys 'six' in a game.

:)

Punkbuster always kicks me for having an "Empty Win32 Module List". It s***s me to tears. Down with PunkBuster, BOOO!!!

Are you logged in as an Administrator? Most recent releases of PB for games require this as the punkbuster client will try to do things that only administrators/debugging users can do, such as open other processes with SE_DEBUG_PRIVELEGE and stuff like that.

Yeah, there's only one account on my PC, and it's an administrator account. I don't have the full version, it's only the demo that does it (no other games that use Punkbuster have done this for me), so hopefully it'll be fine with the full version.