It has not. Punkbuster is gone. I would like to know why, though.
Guess ID don't want to pay Evanbalance a license fee or something. And even though some say punkbuster was shit, I have to disagree. We should try to get it back!
in cpma it was tossed years ago because more people were complaining about it than it was actually helping.
if people really want to cheat, punkbuster will not stop them. the most effectice countermeasure to cheats is making everyone pay for an account, and banning those accounts that cheated, don't even ip ban, just let them pay again-> ban again.
It wasn't perfect and it didn't find all hacks BUT it still found many, especially the older ones. Did you see that british ctf player who got banned? jaz or whatever it was? He used such an obvious old hack, it would surely have been regocnized by punkbuster.
In QL many accounts have been banned when punkbuster recognized cheats on their pcs so it was definitely useful.
The most important part is this: With punkbuster people had to be sure the hacks they download do not get recognized by pb or else their account would be banned, and making a new account and still playing for the same team or still playing with the same IP etc is obvious. It scared many people off. Without punkbuster, every random Joe can download and try everything until he finds what works best and least suspicious.
Yes, punkbuster wasn't the best ever, but without any protection any online competition in this game is just a joke.
Punkbuster always made the servers laggy, which is why it was rarely used on servers in Q3 OSP, CPMA, RA3 etc. Biggest issue in QL is lack of presistent admined servers and no vote for kick unless it is warmup and no kickban vote available to the normal players. Punkbuster is garbage and developing your own anti-cheat solution is quite costly so it is not likely that we will see another anti-cheat in QL.
I know about the lag problems but everyone has them so it's fair. A player using hacks as he likes is however not fair at all.
The thing with kick votes and lock and all those commands that people are talking about is that I honestly do not care much about guys like detlew joining public matches and hitting obvious 80% shaft ... I'm worried about online tournaments and "decent" players hitting a solid nearly 40% "smooth aim hack" shaft + wh + item timer which is nearly impossible to see from a demo. And honestly I have seen some rather odd things lately, i.e. people who could strafe but not really move well and who made very odd decisions. They hit a lot though.
For such hacks you don't need kick votes because you can hardly identify the cheaters. You don't need their demo because you can hardly see anything obvious in there. You need a software that checks what's going on on the cheater's computer, simple as that.
You mean like jaz obviously searched the net for hours and found a thousand year old super obvious hack to use it against some of the best ctf players in Europe?
No. Most people don't want to pay for their hacks. And with smooth aim bullshit being available for free, punkbuster can definitely help to get rid of those guys.
You are wrong. If someone wants to cheat no cheap anticheat client can do much about it. I doubt that ID will invest a 6 figure sum into a new anticheat client. Read about the new wire program from esl and how much money they spent into its development.
I mean back then they had aequitas and still there were so many obvious cheaters who didn't get busted by aequitas but due to timetables.
Even if there were a anticheat client people would still cheat because players don't get punished for creating new accounts.
but you seem to not understand that however 'obvious' an aimbot looks onscreen has nothing to do with how easy he is detectable by anti-cheat software.
I do understand it and that is exactly the point. While I was merely implying that the obvious hack was probably a thousand years old and would have been detected "even" by punkbuster, I actually want to point out that we need a tool that can do just what you said: Detect a cheat no matter how obvious it is. Because that is the real problem -- as I said before -- that the cheats that aren't even exactly "new" anymore these days offer smooth aim bullshit, wh and item timers and are nearly impossible to see from a demo.
We need such a tool.
About pb being completely useless and the multi account problem: The community isn't that big. If a guy gets banned and two days later a "new player" shows up on the team site of a clan, that's pretty obvious. Leagues like ESL also check (and reject) account name changes. And punkbuster did catch some (if not many) cheaters. Asked by an admin syncerror was able to say exactly what hacks punkbuster had detected and the regarding players were banned on QL and -- more important -- the league.
Punkbuster is not useless. Even if in many cases it's for sheer intimidation. And yes, we do have more cheaters than we had with punkbuster imHo.
I don't know but could you turn them on and off so they couldn't be detected. I'd have the anti-cheat check at a random time.
Tbh though I don't see it as a massive problem. When I first started out for the first couple of years I used to think loads of people cheated but then I started to realise some people are just that good. Or are just hitting all the important shots.
You are missing the point. There is no reason to degrade the experience of all players for something that is close to useless. Playing quake with all players having 300 ping is fair since it is equal, that doesn't mean it is a good experience. Btw. since you mention punkbuster protecting competitions, you should ask Yuka how effective PB is.
Yuka use custom hack, obviously it can not be detected from anticheat protection that search for signatures. I saw one cheater during 2010, now for 1m I saw 7-8(I talk about duel servers). Punkbuster is useless vs custom hacks, but not for the ones that 10 years old child can find on google for 10 min.
The difference between CPMA and QuakeLive is demographics.
CPMA was a niche mod of an already niche game/community.
Most of the players were fairly genuine and respect skill etc as they came from earlier iterations of it.
Quakelive has been promoted and marketed as a mass market, free game with hardcore roots, which basically means you become open to the casual gamers who would otherwise never have even played. Quake isn't a game that finds you, you have to look for it and stick through getting raped becuase "you get" that losing a 1000 games of the "right game" is making you a better player with every loss, in the deepest sense.
And real gamers/athletes/ only care about real victories. Modern gamers care about winning by any means possible. If they can't win, they ..
If all of a sudden its being made accessible and pushed to people who did not have the drive to be a part of it off their own back, you will find those are the sort of people who resort to cheating.
So to summarise. Quakelive needs cheat protection becasue you have a higher ratio of cheat tpye gamers playing it now who would not have before.
Except it lags and stutters, throws out false positives, kicks people for arbitrary reasons, and is generally a piece of shit.
Unless you can make an AC client that actually catches brand-new hacks and doesn't get in the way, there's no point. The only thing an easy-to-bypass system like PB or VAC accomplishes is creating a huge market for hack writers to make a small fortune in. At least when there's no anti-cheat, cheaters are just using shitty google hacks and nobody's making money off of it. If anti-cheat software didn't exist, all the big names like artificial aiming and organner would no longer exist, and the hacks that were left over would be so shitty no one would use them.
I doubt that many people want to pay for the newest hacks. Yes, you would still have some cheaters left but you would also have the hope that they would be in trouble the moment punkbuster recognizes their hacks.
The biggest problem however is that people just download the first decent thing they find on google and don't hesitate to use it right away -- because no one realizes it. From what I've seen on youtube even the newer smooth aim bullshit is available for free now.
With punkbuster you had a cheater in higher leages "every now and then"... these days I'm not sure if there aren't a great many to be honest.
Punkbuster lags and stutters but it does for everyone so no big deal, and it catches a fair amount of hacks and effectively scares people off. The main factor is intimidation.
I hope the leagues will act and introduce their own anti cheat software, like for example the ESL did with Wire. It already works with great success in many other games. Client-side hacks are things of the past now. And as u can't modify server files in QL, it would be a VERY safe protection from those fucking cheaters.
wrong, or tell me where can I buy a wire proof private hack which is undectected. u will soon notice there is "no such thing:)
not even organer.pl did one. and he was the only one to bypass aequitas (former wire)