PunkBuster NOT Confirmed for Battlefield 3

[Minmaster]

Re: PunkBuster NOT Confirmed for Battlefield 3

as much as i hate PB, there are no other choices. PB right now is causing CPU spikes in BC2 that makes it very hard to play, esp. if you have only dual cores.

[K-16]

VAC delays bans intentionally to make testing new cheats rather difficult. Without knowing exactly when VAC will kick in (the delay is supposedly random), it's harder to tell if the new cheat (or cheats/which ones) is bypassing the anti-cheat or not. I thought that was pretty obvious, rather than let developers test their cheats and go through faster revisions if VAC does an immediate ban.As for DICE, I hope their choice of anti-cheat is a good one. In the end though, admins who are responsible, reliable, and not power-tripping make the best anti-cheat enforcement. I just hope BF3 gets the same support Activision gave for CoD: MW2. I'm talking about live enforcement of course, as the anti-cheat for CoD was embarassingly easy to circumvent (free nukes anyone?).

[Vreki]

Re: PunkBuster NOT Confirmed for Battlefield 3

I know that is their stated reason, but I have lost faith in it.
It may allow them to catch more cheaters, but we, as gamers, do not really benefit from the number of cheaters caught.
We benefit from cheaters being unable to play. The less "cheat-hours" in the game the better. Also it hurts the game when you know that a deteced cheat may be allowed to run rampant, since you have even less faith in those playing well.

[K-16]

Any suggestions as to how you would prevent developers from knowing whether or not their cheat will bypass the anti-cheat, without resorting to delayed bans? Immediate bans can be an indicator for cheats that can bypass the system when one doesn't get banned within the expected/predictable time limit. We already learned cheat disabling isn't working as well as we would've liked, because like viruses, there's more revisions and newly created cheats than anyone can keep up. Only reason why I haven't lost faith in it, is because I can't think of a better solution. Makes me wonder how DICE will tackle this issue without solely relying on live enforcement (admins).

[Vreki]

Re: PunkBuster NOT Confirmed for Battlefield 3

Any suggestions as to how you would prevent developers from knowing whether or not their cheat will bypass the anti-cheat, without resorting to delayed bans? .

I dont really care about the devlopers getting caugth when they try out their hacks. They have to be a tiny minority, you are unlikely to ever encounter anyone using homemade hacks.

But cheats are big business today, and they need to push the cheats to their customers. And that means that PB etc. should be able to get their hands on the cheats as soon as the they go live.
So WTH cant they manage to get rid of them?

ETA: I found this interesting post:

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-2-archive/188104-fairytale-about-cheating.html

I see a lot of complaints about cheating. So here’s a fairytale about cheats and cheating based on a true story.

Well – on time in the past we had a huge problem in Battlefield 1942. The problem was cheating. At one point there where no fun at all joining a server because there where a huge bunch of cheaters on almost every server having advantages over you that made your playing boring.

Suddenly we got Punk Buster! It was supposed to stop cheaters from cheating by detecting them and kick them from the respective servers running it. We all felt safe for a while there, and Punk Buster did work because in the cheaters’ forums they struggled with getting pass it. It was fun to watch and I often did ‘muhahahaha’ on them.

After a while it came to the public notice that Punk Buster wasn’t any magic cheat detector that made us safe after all. First of all it only scans a part of the computer’s memory, which gives the cheaters a ‘chance’ to get away even when using public and detected cheats. With a bit of luck, Punk Buster doesn’t scan the part of the memory that your cheat is running in. So we all got disappointed. But another disappointment was waiting in queue. PRIVATE CHEATS/HACKS COULD NEVER BE DETECTED BY PUNK BUSTER! Hm! What’s the point then? Well, it actually did something about the public ones, but the private ones where safe to use.

One guy – one sorry lalala coder – added 2 + 2 and got 4: Why not earn some money on this? And he started selling private and unique cheats. It was allowed and still is. You can actually start a successful business by selling cheats for BF2 and etc. And he DID earn money. Since he forgot to patent his idea, others started as well, and then you had webshops around the net selling cheats for games – including BF2.

BUT - the buyers weren’t safe enough! There where always a chance that some honest soul – a true patriot – bought these cheats only to report them to Punk Buster. Then the people got a bit restrictive about buying something that would last for ... how long?

Another guy – another sorry lalala coder – but this one even better than the one before him – got into the technology idea. Why not use the technology available to finally win over Punk Buster? Hi did! He came up with an idea that cheats/hacks can easily be streamed live from internet servers, changing its architecture and code continuously, so advanced that not the most awake admin and the best screenshot could prove it. Then he started selling it. People came back with a big grin over their faces. More coders started to exploit this new marked – and they won.

To day you can do an easy search on Google, and you will find several companies that sells high-tech cheats that neither Punk Buster or any admin can detect and prove. They all work and some of them work very well. It’s like shopping a package of DVD-Rs – as easy as that. Anyone can buy it, anytime, anywhere and start using it. You can decide now that you want to start cheating in BF2, and 15 minutes later, you’re sitting on an admin controlled server and cheating without any important persons taking notice.

We’re back to square one and now the cheating is extreme. Punk Buster is there, but it doesn’t work any more. It may detect a two year old public hack still hanging around as a torrent or on another P2P system. The new breed of cheaters are here, they’ve taken over and kicking our buts for a laugh.

And here is when you should start crying.

But still: Subscribe to the cheats, know the IP of the streaming servers, instaban for anyone having a connection to them.

ETA2:
How about this: Let PB check for processes not on a positive list of know harmless applications, and refuse to launch games until everything else has been shut down?

[K-16]

My bad. I should've been more clearer. What I meant was developers who think their cheats bypass VAC will falsely assure cheaters (the majority) that their cheats are safe to use. When the cheaters use them and run rampant for a bit, they will have no idea a ticking time bomb is already on their heads as VAC already flagged them. From there we will never hear from them again (on secured servers anyways, provided they don't buy a new copy/make a new Steam account).

Suggestion one is a must, but obviously like variants of a cheat/virus, you can't flag the internet. From masked IPs to new servers, you can't hit them all. The number of cheaters won't increase nor decrease. It will be identical to the time before internet streaming was available for cheating.

Suggestion two will piss off casual users of computers (non-techies so to speak) who have no idea how to shut anything down that PB hasn't added to the database, or even LAN cafes with their own propietary software (tracking customers' usage time, locking desktops, etc.). There's also nothing stopping the developers from making their cheats hook on to legitimate processes. I was hit with TDSS a month ago, and 7 virus scanners couldn't find the damn thing being attached to iexplorer.exe. Unless you're asking PB to create a seperate shell from Windows explorer itself (the 8th virus scanner did that to finally stop TDSS), circumventing the process check is pretty easy. Keep in mind, your computer will be bogged down and alt-tabbing will be unavailable (since explorer is locked out).

This will be my last reply regarding this topic, as further replies from me would require a seperate thread or a PM (which I think I disabled since I never use it). However, you have made interesting points and answered my questions (and provided external reference), so I will be keeping an eye on this thread for your reply, and will read it completely.

[Vreki]

Re: PunkBuster NOT Confirmed for Battlefield 3

Suggestion two will piss off casual users of computers (non-techies so to speak) who have no idea how to shut anything down that PB hasn't added to the database, or even LAN cafes with their own propietary software (tracking customers' usage time, locking desktops, etc.). There's also nothing stopping the developers from making their cheats hook on to legitimate processes. I was hit with TDSS a month ago, and 7 virus scanners couldn't find the damn thing being attached to iexplorer.exe. Unless you're asking PB to create a seperate shell from Windows explorer itself (the 8th virus scanner did that to finally stop TDSS), circumventing the process check is pretty easy. Keep in mind, your computer will be bogged down and alt-tabbing will be unavailable (since explorer is locked out).

I was thinking that PB could supply a tool like AMDs Fusion for desktop, which turns "extra" processes on and off with the touch of a button: http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloa.../overview.aspx

In some ways I like the idea of having games come as a complete image that must be run in a virtual machine. You wouldn't even need Windows, since VMware can be run from a number of different OS.
The downside is that it would disable a lot of customization, in some way turning our PC into nothing but powerful consoles. I am not sure about how I would feel about that.

[stilla-killa]

Re: PunkBuster NOT Confirmed for Battlefield 3

Well from the leaked pictures it shows a PB in one of the pics.