Were have you got the evidence for such a statment?
f**ck
Steve
(Steve)
#22
CAL and TWL were postponed for a whole week??? Good lord! What ever will we do?
BTW - This is the first time I’ve ever heard that the cd-key was ruining the game.
damocles
(damocles)
#23
your not reading what i posted. last seasons CAL / TWL playoffs were post-poned a full week because of yet another botched PB update. I would prefer the league that I play in decide what version of anti-cheat software is to be used.
Someone already beat me to the sarcastic “one week, good lord!” comment here 
I’d rather the companies figure out how to stop cheating themselves so the next big game they release implements all the lessons learned from the in-house work. But hey, its cheaper to outsource so I’m dreaming. We’re stuck with punkbuster.
And you’re not reading what I’m saying - you CANNOT stop cheating. It’s an impossibility. There is no such thing as the perfect, cheat-proof game. Anything that involves a conditional check in the code is breakable. And a program without a conditional check would be the “hello world” app. And I stopped playing that a few weeks after it came out 
All you can do is learn what cheats are out, then prevent those cheats from being used. This is why a company like even balance is a good thing - a company paid to keep on updating it’s anti-cheat software. You’re idea of having the game company make the anti-cheat software into the point release of the game would only work until someone circumvents the anti-cheat software in the game - then it’d need to be updated again, something games companies cannot afford to do themsevles. They only make small increases in profits with anti-cheat updates - a games company’s main income will always be new games. Which is why the cheat task is sourced out to PB. It’s cheaper and makes more sense.
No it doesn’t. Common cheats stopped with the “pure” server checks. People got around this by changing their client to trick a pure server check. All someone needs to do is modify their punkbuster client to send back the code that says “all is well, no wall hacks here!”. The SAME WAY CHEATS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WRITTEN. Instead of modifying code written by iD, the cheat authors modifiy code written by evenbalance.
No sh**. You don’t say. Well I never. Of course people are altering a different peice of code, the difference here is that even balance can become aware of the alterations and add code to PB to check for people altering the PB client. That is the whole point of a continually updated anti-cheat system.
No it’s not impossible. You don’t have to see proof of concept to know that something in their net could be exploited. iD COULD be paying a larger team to proactively look for problems in their code which could eventually be exploited by cheaters. That’s how it used to work. NOW they sit back and wait for exploits to surface, to make their way onto google’s index, and then evenbalance swings into action.
You appear to be under the impression that games companies have unlimited funds. You may in fact be surprised to learn that games companies make very little from their releases. It’s the publishers that make the main profit from games. Even the very well established and exceedingly rich ID software cannot afford to pay a large team of programmers to go over and over their code (code which is already working fine and doing the job it was designed to do) just to find ‘potential’ problems that cheaters may try and use. That is the lamest idea I’ve ever heard. It would eat away massive chucnks of the company’s funds and all for the ‘possibility’ of preventing cheats. And even with this extra vigilence, cheaters would find another entry point from which to cause havoc. You simply don’t seem to understand that cheat pre-empting is not only impossible, but financial suicide. Games companies are a business like any other. They are not put here on earth to serve your needs. They are here to make money.
yes, people who are smart enough to figure it out, people who pound away at code their whole lives are often called losers… they will never go away though, we have to share this world with them. the ONLY way to fight a wall hack is with map design. the only way to fight an aim bot is with gameplay. and whoppie, we have punkbuster to fight cvars and postpone the playoffs.
No, people who are smart enough to do this, but instead of putting their knowledge to good use they use it to ruin other peoples enjoyment of a game are called losers. If those cheaters were to work against cheating, or worked in games companies (or any software company) they could get some respect. As all they do is ruin peoples enjoyment of games, they are sad little gits who really need to get laid.
And I would love to hear how you think map designers can fight wallhacks. As a map maker myself, I know that you cannot plan a level to fight wall-hacking. Any level that did this would be appalling to play. You have to design the maps to be fun and interesting, not to try and fight cheaters. It’s bad enough that you have to spend time thinking about how you can prevent extreme spawn camping let alone having to try and design a map where wall-hacks can’t be used properly.
And how much are you going to cry about having your precious tournament delayed by a whole week (good lord!). It’s one week for christs sake! A one week delay because, shock horror, someone made a mistake. A mistake? Good lord! Why didn’t someone tell me people aren’t infallible. After all, everyone knows that game developers are gods and never need to patch their software. You really do come across to me as nothing more than a spoilt brat who wants to whine and complain and blame the first available target because his precious tournament got delayed.
bogs
(bogs)
#24
So it aint that easy and seamless. whenever rtcw crashes for me, as it did last night, light blue punkbuster lettering ALWAYS sits at the top of the screen. punkbuster has been know to hang you client (grey screen) for up to five minutes without any status messages when you start rtcw. It’s not a great, wonderfull piece of software. For what it’s doing logistically, it’s terrible, terrible stuff. There no reason for something like punkbuster to crash but it does - a LOT.
I’d rather the companies figure out how to stop cheating themselves so the next big game they release implements all the lessons learned from the in-house work. But hey, its cheaper to outsource so I’m dreaming. We’re stuck with punkbuster.
And you’re not reading what I’m saying - you CANNOT stop cheating.
Good, I said it enough times, now you repeat me. EXCELLENT!
You’re idea of having the game company make the anti-cheat software into the point release of the game would only work until someone circumvents the anti-cheat software in the game - then it’d need to be updated again
It’s not an idea. It’s how it works. When someone finds something that can be exploited, it gets fixed. We’ve already had 2 major revisions of netcode in RTCW. And it was iD that made the fixes, not punkbuster. All punkbuster does is ban cvars. OSP or another free mod DID do the same thing as punkbuster - and more.
All you can do is learn what cheats are out, then prevent those cheats from being used.
You canT prevent them. You can modify your punkbuster to send back codes saying “all cvars are ok on this machine”, meanwhile you have a timenudge of -100 and picmip of 20. Punkbuster is useless.
the difference here is that even balance can become aware of the alterations and add code to PB to check for people altering the PB client. That is the whole point of a continually updated anti-cheat system.
Well, I don’t know why a person smart enough to hack their punkbuster client to skip cvar checks wouldn’t ALSO hack it to make it pretend it was always up to date.
It’s the publishers that make the main profit from games.
They also assume a lot of risk. You could get a big check from a publisher and the game could flop and the publisher still pays you.
Even the very well established and exceedingly rich ID software cannot afford to pay a large team of programmers to go over and over their code (code which is already working fine and doing the job it was designed to do) just to find ‘potential’ problems that cheaters may try and use. That is the lamest idea I’ve ever heard. It would eat away massive chucnks of the company’s funds and all for the ‘possibility’ of preventing cheats.
Well ‘large’ is relative but - yes iD does pay a team to work on RTCW code to search for bugs and fix it. They still pay people to work on q3. But these teams are learning less about certain problems now that punkbuster addresses cvars and pk3 flags. So expect doom3 to have a lot of the same cheats that q3 and rtcw did and thank the folks at evenbalance for it.
You simply don’t seem to understand that cheat pre-empting is not only impossible, but financial suicide. Games companies are a business like any other. They are not put here on earth to serve your needs. They are here to make money.
Yeah, and HOW do they make money? By outsourcing punkbuster and making the community think their games are cheat proof, that it’s actually stopping cheating. Marketing, hype, it’s a head screw. the more tricks like this they pull, the higher their profit margin. They would NOT be outsourcing PB if it didn’t MAKE them money.
And I would love to hear how you think map designers can fight wallhacks.
It depends a lot on the movement and physics. For ET for example, big doors, hills, big map, entrances on a slope, multiple entry points. Stand back and lean if you think someone’s behind a corner. Easy to do with a big door. There are plenty of great examples of amazing map design on Fuel Dump (which includes making them resistant to wallhacks). For the most part, it goes back to what I said. A guy with or without a wallhack could abush you. And if you have a lot of experience playing, no matter who attacks you, you’ll start shooting at the same time. So they just don’t help that much. What it comes down to, is your just one of those guys that call people cheaters when you couldn’t possibly know. And that ruins the game more than cheating itself EVER POSSIBLY COULD!
As a map maker myself, I know that you cannot plan a level to fight wall-hacking. Any level that did this would be appalling to play. You have to design the maps to be fun and interesting, not to try and fight cheaters.
Well as a map maker and game designer, I gotta tell you that you should be doing both. But don’t get hung up on wall hacks. Worry about preventing spawn camping.
It’s bad enough that you have to spend time thinking about how you can prevent extreme spawn camping let alone having to try and design a map where wall-hacks can’t be used properly.
Shouldn’t that be what is enjoyable about the process? Solving the problems?
A mistake? Good lord! Why didn’t someone tell me people aren’t infallible.
Wow harping on this a lot eh… wonder why. could it be because you said punkbuster’s autoupdate was better than installing the OSP mod when the league said it should be installed? I think so…
Vengeance
(Vengeance)
#25
PB isnt perfect but it does stop ppl cheating obivously it dosnt stop eveery cheat because ppl are always trying new hacks.
Without PB all the known hacks that PB is currently stopping will become available to use again and this will only serve to drive ppl away from the game.
PB can cause problems I know i have had problems myself with it, but i prefer these problems to playing on a server full of cheats.
bogs
(bogs)
#26
So many people just quote the punkbuster site without thinking. What happens when the most common cheat is a modified punkbuster client that tells the server that nothing is wrong?
Without PB all the known hacks that PB is currently stopping will become available to use again and this will only serve to drive ppl away from the game.
Not any wall hack or aimbot since they would be caught by pure server check. But just like with a modified rtcw client, with a modified punkbuster client, all known hacks ARE CURRENTLY AVAILABLE. It’s not stopping anything beyond someone who types /cl_timednuge -100 or changes some other cvar out of range by accident and then gets kicked for 5 minutes. All it does is keep the honest players using a common config. OSP used to do that. Last night I saw someone get kicked for 5 minutes because of an empty player name. It’s happened to me before too. I didn’t erase my config but all my settings (including my name) were blank. So punkbuster kicks you for buggy software. Great. I’m so glad we have it. When you tried to change a cvar with OSP, it used to say “sorry, not allowed” INSTEAD of kicking you. Don’t let marketing types fool you. Think about it!
but i prefer these problems to playing on a server full of cheats.
It’s sick really… Without punkbuster, every good player gets called a cheater by people like you. You’ve changed your mind. I’m glad we have punkbuster. less whining. “well im on a punkbuster server, he couldn’t be cheating - gg”.
Vengeance
(Vengeance)
#27
I was just saying what I thought and something is better than nothing.
Also on good servers the admin config PB to stop ppl form extreme tweaking.
PS i have never called any1 a cheat unless its beyond obvious - such as shooting them in the head with 30 bullets at close range without them dropping - which happend other day on RTCW.
damocles
(damocles)
#28
So it aint that easy and seamless. whenever rtcw crashes for me, as it did last night, light blue punkbuster lettering ALWAYS sits at the top of the screen. punkbuster has been know to hang you client (grey screen) for up to five minutes without any status messages when you start rtcw. It’s not a great, wonderfull piece of software. For what it’s doing logistically, it’s terrible, terrible stuff. There no reason for something like punkbuster to crash but it does - a LOT.
By that very same reasoning there is no reason for any peice of software to crash, ever. Software has bugs, software crashes, get over yourself. You act like you’re some semi-god that could write a perfect game that would never crash and never do anything it wasn’t supposed to. It would be completely cheat proof and the greatest game in hisrtory - why? because you made it of course. Wake up to the real world for a change.
[/quote]
Quote:
And you’re not reading what I’m saying - you CANNOT stop cheating.
Good, I said it enough times, now you repeat me. EXCELLENT!
You’re insane. One minute you walk around saying that cheating should be stopped by games companies, then the next you’re congratualting me for saying it can’t be done. I think you need to get an RMA, you’re mind is acting strangely.
It’s not an idea. It’s how it works. When someone finds something that can be exploited, it gets fixed. We’ve already had 2 major revisions of netcode in RTCW. And it was iD that made the fixes, not punkbuster. All punkbuster does is ban cvars. OSP or another free mod DID do the same thing as punkbuster - and more.
You’re doing another U-turn. You harped on saying that companies should spend the time finding potential problems in the net code before release, now you’re turning around citing the fact that problems were found in Wolf after release and patches were created. At least choose which side of the fence you want to sit on.
You canT prevent them. You can modify your punkbuster to send back codes saying “all cvars are ok on this machine”, meanwhile you have a timenudge of -100 and picmip of 20. Punkbuster is useless.
Had you bothered to learn the first thing about PB before ranting on about how terrible it is, you would know that PB is able to scan the files in the wolf directories for modifications and hacks. It does a little more than ban cvars, but obviously you’re still hung up on the auto-update delaying your tournament and so are flinging accusations left, right and centre in some desperate attempt to make yourself feel better.
Well, I don’t know why a person smart enough to hack their punkbuster client to skip cvar checks wouldn’t ALSO hack it to make it pretend it was always up to date.
Missed the point completely. If someone hacks their PB client, then if evenbalance learn of this hack, they can attempt to prevent it. That’s why it’s better to have continually updated anti-cheat software from a team of people dedicated to it, rather than having the occasional patch when problems are discovered (patches which you may notice have stopped because Activision/ID have probably decided it’s no longer marketable to continue updating wolf and are instead focusing on ET).
They also assume a lot of risk. You could get a big check from a publisher and the game could flop and the publisher still pays you
Hey - why not avoid my point altogether? I never said publishers didn’t have reason for taking the moeny, my point was that game developers can’t afford to spend their funds and time on cheat prevention AFTER release. Publishers on the other hand can afford to hire teams to do so. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp really.
Well ‘large’ is relative but - yes iD does pay a team to work on RTCW code to search for bugs and fix it. They still pay people to work on q3. But these teams are learning less about certain problems now that punkbuster addresses cvars and pk3 flags. So expect doom3 to have a lot of the same cheats that q3 and rtcw did and thank the folks at evenbalance for it.
Conveniently you change your stance mid-point once again. You originally said that games companies should have teams to find the problems and now you say they are. They don’t actually have dedicated teams, it’s simply a matter that when major problems come to light, ID will do their best to rectify them because at the end of the day, they can’t afford the bad publicity from ignoring serious issues with their software. Reputation is everything in this business.
Yeah, and HOW do they make money? By outsourcing punkbuster and making the community think their games are cheat proof, that it’s actually stopping cheating. Marketing, hype, it’s a head screw. the more tricks like this they pull, the higher their profit margin. They would NOT be outsourcing PB if it didn’t MAKE them money.
Punkbuster is not about making money, it’s about keeping the faith. Games players will (whether unwittingly or not) develop a degree of faith in each company they buy games from. If that company ignores their pleas to fix bugs/cheats, the faith is destroyed and they lose potential sales for their next title. The publishers know this and so do the games companies. Which is why activision are paying even balance to help prevent cheating in wolf/ET. And you’re right on the point that it is marketing. PB is there to help sway the minds of the players that cheating is being dealt with. However, how long do you think this pretense would have lasted if they weren’t actually doing so? 3 months? 6? It’s long past a year that wolf and PB have been bedfellows, you’d think people would have noticed if the cheaters were running rampant wouldn’t you?
It depends a lot on the movement and physics. For ET for example, big doors, hills, big map, entrances on a slope, multiple entry points. Stand back and lean if you think someone’s behind a corner. Easy to do with a big door. There are plenty of great examples of amazing map design on Fuel Dump (which includes making them resistant to wallhacks).
Most of what you list does nothing to combat the effectiveness of wallhacks, they merely serve to make the levels linear in layout. But unless your level goes in a complete straight line, the level is still susceptible to wallhacks. The multiple entry points do serve to reduce the danger of wallhacks in that it reduces the chances of meeting someone using one, but doesn’t actually hamper the use of them. In fact, there is no way of making a fun level that successfully hampers the use of wallhacks. Any corner or peice of cover is a wallhackers dream.
For the most part, it goes back to what I said. A guy with or without a wallhack could abush you. And if you have a lot of experience playing, no matter who attacks you, you’ll start shooting at the same time. So they just don’t help that much.
Ambushing is not a wallhackers tactic. Avoiding ambushes is. You don’t need to cheat to make a good ambush, however a cheater can see an ambush coming and either avoid it, or kill the ambusher before they have a chance to move. And with weapons like rifle grenades, the wall hacker is suddenly a very dangerous cheater.
What it comes down to, is your just one of those guys that call people cheaters when you couldn’t possibly know. And that ruins the game more than cheating itself EVER POSSIBLY COULD!
This is genius. You’ve outdone yourself here. Not only do you accuse me of something without possibly knowing one way or the other, you finish the accusation with the line “when you couldn’t possibly know”. Pure genius. The irony of your own failed arguments astounds me. And for the record, I have never openly accused someone of cheating, not on servers and not in forums. The one time I have suspected a cheater, I asked around on the forums for known bugs/exploits, and even when I became convinced he was cheating I didn’t point the finger.
And you also say that cheating accusations cause more harm than cheating. Setting aside the whole debate about if it’s worse to cheat or to accuse, it goes completely against your prior arguments that PB is feeding the cheat solution marketing spiel to the people. If people buy the PB anti-cheat spiel, then they have no reason to shout cheater. So by your very own logic, PB is making the wolf/ET community a better place to play.
Shouldn’t that be what is enjoyable about the process? Solving the problems?
These aren’t design problems, they are design issues. A problem is how to keep the framerates high and the map still fun. How to stop people abusing your level layout and ruining the fun for everyone else is an issue. There’s no fun in modifying your level from what would be fun to something that might not be fun just because a few people choose to abuse the system.
Wow harping on this a lot eh… wonder why. could it be because you said punkbuster’s autoupdate was better than installing the OSP mod when the league said it should be installed? I think so…
Wahey, let’s finish your little rant by putting words in my mouth. I never once said PB was better than OSP. Having never had much experience using OSP I don’t feel qualified to comment which is better. I said PB is a good thing and doesn’t deserve to be slagged off by someone with sour grapes.
mono
(mono)
#29
Actually, while I support the idea of punk buster, I hate PB with a passion in reality.
My linux PB client CONSTANTLY goes into distress, can’t load pbag.so, etc and kicks me from the server. I have never had any problems with Quake, Wolf or ET on my linux machine except for @&%&@#@$ Punk Buster.
I have never tried a cheat in an online game, I just don’t see the point or fun in it. But damn, I’d try to find a Punk Buster hack just to make punk buster stop booting me from a good match.
bogs
(bogs)
#30
True, but the punkbuster marketing folks would have everyone believe that THEY are the only way to stop cheaters. Well they are not the only solution. Mod’s like OSP worked much better than punkbuster has performed. All we need is a simply way to enforce cvars. There is no reason for a giant bloated app like punkbuster to be bundled inside RTCW when the same thing could be accomplished with a few comparison statements.
if he was actually there, he would have died. the server decided he wasn’t though. either because of lag on his end, the servers end, or your end. but i guess your another person who thinks the internet is perfect, computers are perfect, so the only POSSIBLE explanation is the guy was cheating. don’t believe the hype.
Vengeance
(Vengeance)
#31
if he was actually there, he would have died. the server decided he wasn’t though. either because of lag on his end, the servers end, or your end. but i guess your another person who thinks the internet is perfect, computers are perfect, so the only POSSIBLE explanation is the guy was cheating. don’t believe the hype.
Lol, i might agree with you if he wasnt letting me shoot him just so he could type lol then kill me
bogs
(bogs)
#32
Never said at, never implied that.
Software has bugs, software crashes, get over yourself.
I’d be the first person to remind people of that. I want ET now. Bugs and all. Cause your never going to fix every bug. Waiting to release something until it’s “bug-free” is like waiting for your $5k dream PC to drop in price by 3 grand…
You act like you’re some semi-god that could write a perfect game that would never crash and never do anything it wasn’t supposed to.
No dude, your just saying that because you THINK that’s what I am. Just like you bitch about all the cheaters cause you THINK they they couldn’t possibly be better than YOU so they MUST be cheating. Check your head.
It would be completely cheat proof and the greatest game in hisrtory - why? because you made it of course. Wake up to the real world for a change.
Hey man, if I had to write something that auto-updated and locked cvars I gurantee it would not be crashing or kicking people and banning them for 5 minutes. Punkbuster is not AT ALL on the same scale as RTCW code. it’s a seperate piece that does something really SIMPLE and they can’t get it right. For fuck sakes, they KICK people. Why not let them simply not set the cvar out of range. To me that says evenbalance cares more about their marketing dollars than their production dollars.
You’re insane. One minute you walk around saying that cheating should be stopped by games companies, then the next you’re congratualting me for saying it can’t be done.
No I said the game companies should fight the war on cheating. Not outsource it. I also said that punkbuster makes people think there is less cheating when it does NOTHING in respect to hacked clients which is the REAL problem with cheating.
I think you need to get an RMA, you’re mind is acting strangely.
Haven’t worked retail for quite a few years but I’ll see what I can do.
You’re doing another U-turn. You harped on saying that companies should spend the time finding potential problems in the net code before release
Never did I use the word BEFORE. Never did I say this. I said they could stand to benefit from the lessons learned from a team of people working on the point releases. So new games don’t repeat the same mistakes.
Had you bothered to learn the first thing about PB before ranting on about how terrible it is, you would know that PB is able to scan the files in the wolf directories for modifications and hacks.
I KNOW it does this. But this is redundant because a pure server check is doing the same thing. So now it takes longer to load my game and there is nothing extra being done. Thanks PB. Hacked PB client gets around this BTW.
Missed the point completely. If someone hacks their PB client, then if evenbalance learn of this hack, they can attempt to prevent it.
Yes, but what does that accomplish? Nothing if you have a hacked PB client. It never needs to download another version, when a new PB server is released, the MOST they could do is change the format of their protocol to confuse old hacked clients. If you have a hacked client, it’s only a matter of minutes before you fire a up a packet logger, see what with their protocol has changed and then re-hack your PB client. It takes more time to make a map than it does to hack PB. Way more time.
my point was that game developers can’t afford to spend their funds and time on cheat prevention AFTER release.
And my point was as a consumer you should DEMAND the publishers spend the money on the developers instead of “strategic-partnerships” that make their stock price go up.
Conveniently you change your stance mid-point once again. You originally said that games companies should have teams to find the problems and now you say they are.
1st, there’s nothing wrong with changing a stance. That’s the whole point of debate. secondly, my stance did not change. I said that if the war on cheating was fought 100% in-house, it would only stand to make new games better.
They don’t actually have dedicated teams, it’s simply a matter that when major problems come to light, ID will do their best to rectify them
I don’t know how the internals of the company works. Surpised you do.
Reputation is everything in this business.
Yeah. 3dfx bet on reputation. Marketing kicked their asses. now I kick marketing’s ass any time it rears is ugly 3dfx killing head.
Punkbuster is not about making money, it’s about keeping the faith.
see, even you are saying it’s about faith. hype. perception. it is actually doing nothing beyond what a pure server check with OSP can do.
pretense would have lasted if they weren’t actually doing so? 3 months? 6? It’s long past a year that wolf and PB have been bedfellows, you’d think people would have noticed if the cheaters were running rampant wouldn’t you?
This goes back to what I was saying about cheating in general. it’s more of an academic exercise than anything else. I will personally bet $1000 that I could 1 on 1 against any wall hack or aim bot in RTCW and win EVERY TIME. cheats make you a worse player. RTCW has great gameplay, no instagib weapons, and punkbuster. people whine about all cheaters all the time when they have one of those days with 2 kills and 18 deaths each round. whiners.
Most of what you list does nothing to combat the effectiveness of wallhacks, they merely serve to make the levels linear in layout. But unless your level goes in a complete straight line, the level is still susceptible to wallhacks. The multiple entry points do serve to reduce the danger of wallhacks in that it reduces the chances of meeting someone using one, but doesn’t actually hamper the use of them. In fact, there is no way of making a fun level that successfully hampers the use of wallhacks. Any corner or peice of cover is a wallhackers dream.
Well, you know you can lean in RTCW right? Just lean. Or check behind walls as you run through doorways. Wall hack or not, if you don’t check your gonna die. Especially if it’s me camping behind a wall.
This is genius. You’ve outdone yourself here. Not only do you accuse me of something without possibly knowing one way or the other, you finish the accusation with the line “when you couldn’t possibly know”. Pure genius. The irony of your own failed arguments astounds me. And for the record, I have never openly accused someone of cheating, not on servers and not in forums. The one time I have suspected a cheater, I asked around on the forums for known bugs/exploits, and even when I became convinced he was cheating I didn’t point the finger.
You said people cheat a lot. And you like punkbuster 'cause without it there would be more cheating… So how are you not calling anyone a cheater? wtf…
And you also say that cheating accusations cause more harm than cheating. Setting aside the whole debate about if it’s worse to cheat or to accuse, it goes completely against your prior arguments that PB is feeding the cheat solution marketing spiel to the people. If people buy the PB anti-cheat spiel, then they have no reason to shout cheater. So by your very own logic, PB is making the wolf/ET community a better place to play.
By that logic, if you have a really loud annoying guy screaming in your left ear, the slightly less loud annoying guy screaming in your right ear is helping things. Nope. They both suck. Cheaters and people who whine about cheaters when it was just lag. Both suck. " i fucking swear, it was a full clip in his head man"… whatever.
These aren’t design problems, they are design issues. A problem is how to keep the framerates high and the map still fun. How to stop people abusing your level layout and ruining the fun for everyone else is an issue.
Take a long thin piece of dowling, write the word “symantics” on it, grease it up real good and put it somewhere. If all you got is symantics I’m gonna find someone more fun to argue with.
bogs
(bogs)
#33
hehe. maybe he laughed because he saw something different. (you shooting a full clip just above or beside his head).
Englander
(Englander)
#34
bogs, either deal with PB or dont play, because the fact is its here to stay so get used to it.
damocles
(damocles)
#35
Whilke this debate is clearly going in circles, I’m bored out of my mind here, so ding ding round three
damocles wrote:
By that very same reasoning there is no reason for any peice of software to crash, ever.
Never said at, never implied that.
Never said you said that. Never implied you implied. Simply said that your reasoning was flawed and provided an extension of your reasoning to demonstrate the flaw.
No dude, your just saying that because you THINK that’s what I am. Just like you bitch about all the cheaters cause you THINK they they couldn’t possibly be better than YOU so they MUST be cheating. Check your head.
Really? When I have I bitched about cheaters? I very rarely bother with cheating discussions (mostly because it usaually breaks down into two stubborn sides of the same argument). And I have never said anything whatsoever about cheaters being better or worse than myself. You are the one that brought this notion into the debate, not I. I am quite happy to accept my distinctly average skills in FPS games, as disheartening as it can be sometimes.
Hey man, if I had to write something that auto-updated and locked cvars I gurantee it would not be crashing or kicking people and banning them for 5 minutes. Punkbuster is not AT ALL on the same scale as RTCW code. it’s a seperate piece that does something really SIMPLE and they can’t get it right. For fuck sakes, they KICK people. Why not let them simply not set the cvar out of range. To me that says evenbalance cares more about their marketing dollars than their production dollars.
Putting aside the blatant generalisation that PB does nothing more than lock cvars (once again) you are saying you would make it perfect when just above you said that I was being the fool for saying you think you can make perfect software.
Yes, but what does that accomplish? Nothing if you have a hacked PB client. It never needs to download another version, when a new PB server is released, the MOST they could do is change the format of their protocol to confuse old hacked clients. If you have a hacked client, it’s only a matter of minutes before you fire a up a packet logger, see what with their protocol has changed and then re-hack your PB client. It takes more time to make a map than it does to hack PB. Way more time.
Like I said before, you cannot stop cheating, but you can deter them. If that means fighting the war on a pifling scale of stopping each hacked client as it is discovered, then so be it. To simply say that it’s not worth trying to stop them simply because it’s hard is giving in. At least by continually updating and trying to stop the cheaters, some of the less hardcore hackers will be put off.
And my point was as a consumer you should DEMAND the publishers spend the money on the developers instead of “strategic-partnerships” that make their stock price go up.
You said yourself it is the publishers that take the risk and that is why they take the lions share of the profits. Demanding that the publisher give a load more money to the games developers would quite likely sink the industry. As much as developers hate to admit it, they need publishers every bit as much as the publisher needs them. It’s a 2-way street and has developed over time to the balance that works best for everyone. Why do you think that companies that have huge finances still use publishers instead of publishing the games themselves?
secondly, my stance did not change. I said that if the war on cheating was fought 100% in-house, it would only stand to make new games better
And after the game is released? What happens when the developers are too busy working on their next title to combat cheats that have cropped up? Why didn’t valve take it upon themselves to combat the huge cheating problem in HL? It’s simply not feasible to continue unlimited support. The larger companies can afford to give some degree of support, but in the end, outsourcing to PB was the wisest move to make as it gives the best balance of cheat combat and time management.
This goes back to what I was saying about cheating in general. it’s more of an academic exercise than anything else. I will personally bet $1000 that I could 1 on 1 against any wall hack or aim bot in RTCW and win EVERY TIME. cheats make you a worse player. RTCW has great gameplay, no instagib weapons, and punkbuster. people whine about all cheaters all the time when they have one of those days with 2 kills and 18 deaths each round. whiners.
Perhaps you can. I’m not saying that cheaters would automatically be better than non-cheaters, I’m saying that an unfair advantage is just that. When it comes down to it, these games have a large public following and your average pubber is not a great player and does not appreciate losing to a cheater. Most of the time the cheaters don’t get found out or the person yelling cheater was completely wrong. But when you are right, it’s wrong. Very wrong. It completely destroys the whole point of open play against other people and is purely for the cheater to derive pleasure from ruining other peoples games. So back to my point above, PB may not be perfect and it may not do as good a job as we’d all wish for, but it still serves the marketing purpose which reduces the number of people crying wolf all the time.
And for the record, Panzerfausts and greandes aqre instagib weapons. A cheater using them can be very dangerous indeed.
Well, you know you can lean in RTCW right? Just lean. Or check behind walls as you run through doorways. Wall hack or not, if you don’t check your gonna die. Especially if it’s me camping behind a wall.
Yeeees, because wolf is a slow paced game where everyone takes the time to lean around every corner in the off chance that someone might be there. And besides, as I said above, wall hacks aren’t dangerous because they sit around corners, they are dangerous because they see you when you’re around the corner.
You said people cheat a lot. And you like punkbuster 'cause without it there would be more cheating… So how are you not calling anyone a cheater? wtf…
I said cheating is commonplace. I never said anything about accusing people of cheating which is what you accused me of doing. In fact, I have commented about how cheat-free the RTCW community is compared to others. And yes I like PB because it reduces cheating. That’s pretty straightforward reasoning. Less cheating = good. More cheating = bad. PB = Good. No PB = Bad.
By that logic, if you have a really loud annoying guy screaming in your left ear, the slightly less loud annoying guy screaming in your right ear is helping things. Nope. They both suck. Cheaters and people who whine about cheaters when it was just lag. Both suck. " i fucking swear, it was a full clip in his head man"… whatever.
No, that is entirely your own warped logic. PB to me, and to many people, is not a screaming guy in your ear. It is the guy handing you the headphones. I can only presume the other screaming guy in your example is the cheaters. Just because you’ve had bad experiences with PB doesn’t automatically make it a bad program. There are thousands who have had flawless experiences with it - do they think it’s a screaming guy in your ear? No, it is the reaction of somoene with negative experiences who wishes for others to see it the same way he does instead of seeing the good in the program.
I do agree that people screaming cheater when it was just lag do have a very bad effect on the game and the community. Alas, there’s not much you can do about it, it’s just human nature to look for the easy-fix reasoning. You just have to hope that as they play more online games, they become accustomed to when someone is lagging or not.
Take a long thin piece of dowling, write the word “symantics” on it, grease it up real good and put it somewhere. If all you got is symantics I’m gonna find someone more fun to argue with.
is·sue
n.
1.A point or matter of discussion, debate, or dispute: legal and moral issues.
2.A matter of public concern
3.A misgiving, objection, or complaint
prob·lem
n.
1.A question to be considered, solved, or answered
2.A situation, matter, or person that presents perplexity or difficulty
See the diference. Problems are good. Problems are there to be solved. An issue is bad. That’s why it has gone from being a problem into being an issue. That was my point. The point that games developers shouldn’t be spending their valuable time on trying to solve issues created by a few annoying losers, they should be concentrating on solving the problem of creating fun and interesting games to play.
Can’t beleive I had to open the friggin dictionary :disgust: [/b]
bogs
(bogs)
#36
my first attempt to reply was deleted (with good reason). I apologize to the moderators of this forum and anyone else in the community I offeded.
I dont know why you think that. I never implied anything like that. And comparing Punkbusters code vs code for a game is comparing apples and oranges. Punkbuster, for what it’s doing, is a huge, bloated app that crashes way more than a SIMPLE app should crash.
One minute you walk around saying that cheating should be stopped by games companies, then the next you’re congratualting me for saying it can’t be done.
I’m congradulating you for realizing you can’t stop hacked clients - ever. And I wasn’t saying that cheating should be stopped by game companies. I’m saying it already IS - and in fact, they are the only ones who can fight against it effectivly.
You’re doing another U-turn. You harped on saying that companies should spend the time finding potential problems in the net code before release, now you’re turning around citing the fact that problems were found in Wolf after release and patches were created. At least choose which side of the fence you want to sit on.
I know exactly what side of the fence I’m on. I still don’t think you get what I’m saying. Punkbuster is a placebo. And just to clarify, I said that if the war on cheating was handled more “in-house” than it already is, then the next game they work on will be less likely to have the same problems that their current generation of games had.
Had you bothered to learn the first thing about PB before ranting on about how terrible it is, you would know that PB is able to scan the files in the wolf directories for modifications and hacks.
If you ever bother to take the time to understand what I’m trying to explain, you would know that a pure server check is doing the same thing. It’s redundant.
Missed the point completely. If someone hacks their PB client, then if evenbalance learn of this hack, they can attempt to prevent it.
All they can do is change their protocol. If you have a modified PB client, fire up a packet sniffer and see what has changed and re-hack your client. After you have the modified PB client, it takes less time to figure out what changed in their protocol than it does to make a map from scratch.
That’s why it’s better to have continually updated anti-cheat software from a team of people dedicated to it, rather than having the occasional patch when problems are discovered (patches which you may notice have stopped because Activision/ID have probably decided it’s no longer marketable to continue updating wolf and are instead focusing on ET).
I’ll have you know that the “dedicated” people finding these problems are the gamers. They report them to the community, to the leagues, to everyone. Leagues were enforcing ui_fullscreen LONG before it was in punkbuster. Punkbuster is redundant. Cvar checks could be done ingame.
Conveniently you change your stance mid-point once again. You originally said that games companies should have teams to find the problems and now you say they are.
No, to clarify I said game companies could spend their money better by adding cvar enforcement code in-house as opposed to outsourcing it. And I’m not suddenly saying they are, I’m saying point releases still come out years after the game is finished so SOMEONE must be writing the code. The CODE DOESN’T WRITE ITSELF 
Read the changelog next time a wolf point release comes out. It’ll be a while but eventually one will come out.
Reputation is everything in this business.
3dfx thought repuation was everything too. Then marketing came along and kicked their butts. So now in memorial to 3dfx, the greatest company to ever be, I always point out when products have more marketing than product. cough. java. cough.
Punkbuster is not about making money, it’s about keeping the faith. Games players will (whether unwittingly or not) develop a degree of faith in each company they buy games from.
We agree. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Keeping the faith. By any means necasary even if it means tricking people into thinking punkbuster stops cheaters.
However, how long do you think this pretense would have lasted if they weren’t actually doing so? 3 months? 6? It’s long past a year that wolf and PB have been bedfellows, you’d think people would have noticed if the cheaters were running rampant wouldn’t you?
Well that goes back to what I was saying about gameplay. People ARE cheating in wolf. But aim bots and wallhacks just don’t improve your gameplay so much to ruin the game, which is what makes RTCW such a great game. Even if you try to cheat it’s not going to help (much) unless it’s your first FPS.
Most of what you list does nothing to combat the effectiveness of wallhacks, they merely serve to make the levels linear in layout.
Well thats your opinion but I still think it helps. And I still think proper map design helps against cheating more than Punkbuster.
Any corner or peice of cover is a wallhackers dream.
Heh, not if I’m playing. If the wallhacker is hiding, we both end up shooting at the same time. Best player wins. Not the guy who knows the attack is comming. 'cause I go in EXPECTING an attack. And if a wallhacker is avoiding an ambush, i lean and follow him to the other entrance. But your right about the rifle grenade. I don’t like it for that potential exploit. Panzer too I guess… mmm… I’m still pro panzer
[quote]What it comes down to, is your just one of those guys that call people cheaters when you couldn’t possibly know. And that ruins the game more than cheating itself EVER POSSIBLY COULD!
This is genius. You’ve outdone yourself here. Not only do you accuse me of something without possibly knowing one way or the other
[/quote]
Your posting to this thread in defence of punkbuster are you not? You said wolf was the most cheat-free experience you’ve had so you’ve had other expereience with “cheaters”. You dislike these people as cheaters even though you can never say for certain, unless you know them personally, that they are cheating. It wasn’t a failed argument, you simply misunderstood my OPINION about people who complain about cheaters. If you are not one of the regular complainers, I apologize, you just sound like one. To me. my opinion.
If people buy the PB anti-cheat spiel, then they have no reason to shout cheater. So by your very own logic, PB is making the wolf/ET community a better place to play.
That’s like saying if two guys are shouting in your ears, the guys who’s doing it in a less annoying fashion is actually helping???
These aren’t design problems, they are design issues.
And that my friend is a semantic which is also my que to exit and end this conversation because it means there is nothing left to argue over…
bogs
(bogs)
#37
man, now my original reply is back… please stop talking about this… blah…forums are so evil.
bogs
(bogs)
#38
Can’t beleive I had to open the friggin dictionary :disgust:
haha that means i win you know since you went to the dicitonary first. my rules. i win.
we should play some ET instead of bickering. i play as $iw->zep
look me up.