PunkBuster coming to Red Orchestra 2: Heroes Of Stalingrad

 Mike_Nomad, on Jun 21, 2011 - 05:34 AM, said:

Hey Mike, nice to see you over here visiting... Spent many an hour over at your site back in the day. Nice to see you in position for RO2 when it gets released. Lets hope it isn't a disappointment.

We are glad to see you like our Anti Cheat setup. I'm around to answer any RO 2: HOS related questions.

Welcome the forum Yoshiro

 Kolor, on Jun 24, 2011 - 08:48 AM, said:

what she said ^^

btw i think integrating VAC and PB is a smart move

good job

 Yoshiro, on Jun 24, 2011 - 08:39 AM, said:

Hi Yoshiro, glad you took the time and trouble to make your way over here

Its great to see a new game deliver all the "bells and whistles" one expects from a pc game(I truly thought that those days had passed us by)
The anticheat options (VAC / 3 types of PB / Streaming) within the game, have set a precedent within the gaming community, and I wish you every success for the innovative, proactive stance you have taken re AC options for RO2:HOS.
I know MaydaX is itching to get started on making the PBBans streaming side of things the "walk in the park" it should be for prospective new streamers
If anything crops up we will be sure to give you a heads up well in advance of the planned release date.
Now .... if only more game devs / community managers follow your lead we might actually be able to make a positive contribution to the success of newly released games by delivering a top notch anti cheat streaming service on day1 of release

 Yoshiro, on Jun 24, 2011 - 08:39 AM, said:

Welcome to the site, Yoshiro. Glad you could make it.

 Yoshiro, on Jun 24, 2011 - 08:39 AM, said:

Good to see you here Yoshiro

 Yoshiro, on Jun 24, 2011 - 08:39 AM, said:

Very nice. You TWI guys are kind of like heroes to me nowadays. The coming winter should be great with HoS to keep me and my clan occupied with shooting each other in the face.

This is extremely, extremely unfortunate. I cannot believe any developer would make such a drastic mistake as to make a Steamworks game support a Punkbuster level which would read the Steam Overlay as a threat - that's just insane.

I really wish people would better understand the nature of Punkbuster vs VAC. Really the key differences are this: Punkbuster makes loud, public examples out of players - often ones that did absoultely nothing wrong. Because people see "player kicked" messages, they think they're being protected from cheaters, when in reality, this is pretty far from the truth - most PunkBuster supported games are swarming with them on a very extreme level. Where as VAC doesn't go that route, it hides in the background, watching your behavior patterns and then dishes out a VAC ban. In many VAC games you rarely see a cheater, and when you do, they almost always have VAC bans on their account and almost always end up perma-banned if you check their account later. It just doesn't do noisy mid-game kicks.

That's on top of the fact VAC isn't nearly as invasive, doesn't have extremely terrible exploits including ones that actually use the memory scanning against the users by exploiting it and doesn't even think of recommending things like running pbsetup every single time you want to run a game.

In short, if both of these systems were real police agencies, PunkBuster would be the one stringing up people along the road all of the time to re-assure the populace they are being protected, even if those people didn't actually do anything wrong. Where as VAC operates more similar to modern police, gathering evidence before issuing a pretty firm judgement. VAC bans are also much, much harder to circumvent as they impact your Steam account, where you likely have a lot of games.

What many of you may not know is why PunkBuster is even still used, and how it's company is still in business. I've worked with several game developers and I can tell you every single one of them have zero respect for it. The word "placebo" is used very often, and that's exactly what it is: One that does more harm than good, too, since it does the aforementioned security vulnerabilities and kicking of legit players on a semi-regular basis. In short, the company uses a simple marketing tactic of making players believe it's doing well from the kicks, which they then use to sell to Publisher Producers.

Publisher Producers are the people on the publishing side of games, that honestly often have almost no technical knowledge of games. There are of course exceptions but I have, honest to God, known producers of games that didn't know how to open the console disc trays before. These people are sold on PunkBuster helping to sell the game for "cheap and easy," and they often jump on it out of sheer ignorance as to it's actual capabilities. This is then forced on development houses as part of their contract, regardless if the developer actually wants to implement it or not. In some cases, smaller developers will use PunkBuster for similar reasons of ignorance, except purely so the user base can "sleep easy" thinking cheaters are actually being stopped when, in fact, they're really not.

The mere fact people are impressed with ban lists is the entire problem. I'm sure the local police force could arrest countless people a day on every suspicion that even remotely entered their heads, too, but ultimately this means they will be simply getting a large number of "criminals" out of people who were doing nothing, while wasting every drop of time and energy on it, letting the vast majority of criminals who aren't being totally obvious do whatever they want. It's just a broken system.

The long and short of it? VAC is far superior in every single way to PB and they positively do not need to be combined - and shouldn't be, really. It's my hope that more games will be supporting Steamworks and ditching PunkBuster in the future, and I know people who have outright canceled their RO2 orders because they don't want to deal with it's insane number of headaches only to have a game end up littered with cheating anyway.

PS: My personal experience with PunkBuster has been playing exactly two games with it in the past 3 years, in which I've probably been kicked or banned dozens of times for doing absoultely nothing cheat oriented. Being thrown off servers for the act of throwing a cheat-free grenade while at least 3 people on the server are spinning in circles aimbot'ing head shots is the best summary one could ever give this hopelessly outdated product that should have a bad memory from the the early 2000s.

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Like VAC, they do their share of silent detections, too.

And tbh, I'd prefer a certain cheat/non-cheat kick # (ex: AIMBOT #50134) over "Cheat detected." or "You've been banned for past cheating violations". Sure it tells the hackers if their hack is truly detected, but hey it helps pinpoint exactly what program or group of programs is causing it. What if your anti-virus one day just said "Virus detected!" without telling you what specific virus it is?

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Homefront would like to have a word with you.

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If I recall, a VAC game ban only applies to the games its engine is based on. (ex: CS:S & TF2 bans only get you banned from Source games).

So if your theory is correct, then if I was a police officer and I clearly saw a guy robbing a bank, stealing a car, or murdering someone, I would wait 5 weeks or even 5 months before actually arresting the guy?

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Remember Modern Warfare 2? How Robert Bowling / IW promised that VAC would keep the game cheat-free even without admins? Not to say that PB had the same issues, but other games with VAC have had the "Throw in VAC so that the gamers can 'sleep easy'." problem.

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What about MD5tool scans? CVAR scans? Web browser RCON? 3rd party streaming? Features that allows other admins to check clan members and see if they are "clean" or not linked to any other banned GUIDs? No delayed banning all the time?

I don't mean to sound fanboyish or start a total PB vs. VAC debate, but come on, saying VAC is superior in every way to PB? No anti-cheat is "perfect" or "superior" to any other. EVERY game has cheaters. ALL anti-cheats have their flaws, whatever they are. Yes, PB doesn't ban all the hackers, but neither does VAC. Yes, PB kicks for stupid things, but honestly for me, that was because of bad Internet connections. Yes, PB has some features VAC doesn't, but in no way is it superior to VAC.

In fact, I truly applaud Tripwire Interactive for implementing both anti-cheats. Not only did they add the two most used FPS anti-cheat effectively doubling their power to fight back against cheaters (well, along with TWI's own system, tripling), they made BOTH the gamers that don't like VAC AND the gamers that don't like PB happy! If you don't like PB, when the RO2:HOS server browser comes up, just check the "No PunkBuster" filter that they might have. Or at least from playing both PB and VAC games with a server browser, almost every game has some kind of "No PunkBuster/No VAC Secure" filter in it.

But in all, as a RO2:HOS forum user has said, to each his own, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary) and all that.

I dont get it

Why register here to make an "I VAC" post when there are 4 PB options with R02:HOS the first one being "off"

If you dont like PB running on your server the option is there to turn it off, simple ... innit.

What a silly post to make tbh, why have just one or the other when you can implement both? The more anti cheat options out there the better in my opinion. This wasn't a thread about fanboys saying which is better, it was a thread applauding a developer for actually having the intelligence and foresight to use all tools at its disposal.

I stopped reading after the fourth paragraph. Too much bla bla bla - in the wrong thread. Plenty of other threads for choice of AC discussion.

Agree w/ surfy, this topic is yay TW - not A vs B. If you want to kick the Vac vs EB ball around, use the seach feature - and I'd bet there are several threads available we could pick this up in.



butt

 BlazingOwnager, on Jun 26, 2011 - 01:37 AM, said:

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Few examples of how quickly PunkBuster can detect cheaters:

Bad Company 2 - Day 1 (MD5 Tool)
http://www.pbbans.com/mbi-viewban-606fb0e9-vb161738.html

Bad Company 2 - Day 3 (VIOLATION (GAMEHACK) 80474)
http://www.pbbans.com/mbi-viewban-4a17e4f2-vb161966.html

Medal of Honor - Day 2 (VIOLATION (AIMBOT) 50120)
http://www.pbbans.com/mbi-viewban-e4e635fc-vb192444.html

 BlazingOwnager, on Jun 26, 2011 - 01:37 AM, said:

Actually Tripwire may have set a new standard depending on how well PB and VAC works together for RO2. If people canceled pre-orders over PB then that's their loss. Pointless move when you have the option to disable PB.

Bottom line both PB and VAC can be slow when banning cheaters but it's the admin tools such as PBSS, CVAR checks, MD5 Checks, streaming ability etc etc that makes PB a better solution.

 BlazingOwnager, on Jun 26, 2011 - 01:37 AM, said:

tl;dr :rant detected:

 buttscratcher, on Jun 26, 2011 - 06:57 AM, said:

4th paragraph? props on wading that far

i would have to say this innovative move by TWI has raised the hackles of some people. GJ!

generally the people that get upset by new anti-cheat possibilities are the ones that i like to be upset

 BlazingOwnager, on Jun 26, 2011 - 01:37 AM, said:

Nah.

 Yoshiro, on Jun 24, 2011 - 08:39 AM, said:

Back on topic, I'd be curious if there was any hope in TW helping EvenBallance do what Steam did w/ ingame SS - as it relates to the ongoing issue w/ pb_ss failure?

tia



butt

 HSMagnet, on Jun 26, 2011 - 07:54 AM, said:

I came to the same conclusion at exactly the same point.

I don't understand why a thread applauding a developer offering the option of two different anti-cheat services has resulted in posts like that. It doesn't make any sense.

People just want something to complain about I guess. I have issues with PB like any other average gamer, but I prefer it over VAC's system and I would most definitely take it over nothing.

If BlazingOwnager owns or runs a RO2 server in the future I would bet good money that within a short amount of time after release he will be back here claiming his green SGA tags.

I am relishing the opportunity to show people like him and every other complainer and naysayer that PunkBuster, along with an attentive developer, good server administrators and a top notch 3rd party streaming service provider can and will do a damn good job of cleaning up games and providing servers with the protection they need.

Welcome Yoshiro, to our forums - very much looking forward to working with you and the rest of TW

 BlazingOwnager, on Jun 26, 2011 - 01:37 AM, said:

First off, like fozzer said, PB will be optional for server admins. Start reading threads before jumping to conclusions. It even states this on Tripwires' forums here:

http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showpost.php?p=754176&postcount=45

Make sure you read that post over and over until you understand it.

Secondly, As for PB, I never heard people complain so much about it in all my life. How hard is it to update your PB manually and play the game? I have not had a single problem with PB yet. Yes, it may kick you for steam overlay, but, Tripwire already said on their forums that PB coders are making sure that won't happen for this game.

And third, complaining about something that you have no control over is not going to do anything except make you look unprofessional.
If you don't like Tripwires' procedure, then don't buy their games. Simple as that.

 SuperTaz, on Jun 27, 2011 - 09:32 PM, said:

i stream 2 cod4 servers pbbans & psb,
i also have a black ops server.
imho i would rather have pbbans & psb running on the bo server as well.i think that vac has a lame anti cheat. & will continue to suport pbbans,hopeing that we will someday be able to stream all our servers .
i hope this is a step in joining the streaming so we can stream them all,if we choose