This is a series of replies with Hendrik Thole, an employee of the User Support and Documentation branch of Even Balance, aka Punkbuster. William S. aka pyRo is the leader of my ex-clan, (Enemy Territory), which has 130+ members. He wrote to PB to request details on the hardware bans of several members banned within a period of a few weeks who claim that they never hack/ed.
01/10/2006 15:48:10 - “William S.”
Note #1: Ticket submitted to support staff.
01/11/2006 06:12:14 - “Hendrik Thole”
Note #2: We were still waiting for you to supply more information on the bans the other players got. Best thing you can do is to paste all kick messages of those players into a new on this ticket.
01/11/2006 14:09:41 - “William S.”
Note #3: I am currently trying to round up the Ban ID codes for the players that are still around. I will submit them once I have as many as I can get, which will probably be at some point tonight.
Thanks
01/11/2006 16:07:44 - “William S.”
Note #4: One of them is 34a4abd6. This player has recieved a response from you guys stating that he was using a program that prevents PB from running properly on his PC. He is baffled as to what that could be, as he did not even know that it was possible to play with PB being blocked.
There are other players that have not seen my request for their Ban code yet, but when they do I will provide it.
01/12/2006 18:23:25 - “Stuart Dunsmore”
Note #5: Well, BullDozer was kicked multiple times from servers by PB, I guess he missed that part.
01/12/2006 19:27:02 - “William S.”
Note #6: Can I have the time of those kicks and the filepath of his “hack”? That is information that I am sure is readily available and would be something to look into next time I talk to him. I will also check our server logs once I get this information to confirm it with Bull. This has been happening a lot lately, all for the same thing with people I know. There has to be a “bad” file out there that people are downloading, because many of the people that it has happened to have just recently reinstalled ET. Also, PB has been kicking many players for “Ignoring MD5 Queries” or something like that on our server, almost every 15 minutes someone gets kicked for that.
01/12/2006 19:31:04 - “Stuart Dunsmore”
Note #7: Well, the information is not readily available. We don’t give out log info that we have. And PB does not know the file path, this hack was detected loaded in memory. If you give me the IP of your server(s) I can tell you if you should even have a log of any of the kicks though.
01/12/2006 19:37:31 - “William S.”
Note #8: 207.210.232.219
207.210.230.250
Well surely PB keeps records of the kickds doesn’t it? So something as simple as a loading error can count as an offense against a player? If that is the case, I believe these bans may be a server error on our part, relating back to the issue of people being kicked frequently for various reasons.
01/12/2006 20:17:52 - “Stuart Dunsmore”
Note #9: None of the logged violations were on the server IP’s you listed. So you will not find anything in the logs. This is a very specific detection, that is a blatent attempt at bypassing PB. I’m sorry, but I consider this issue closed, there is nothing more I can tell you.
Keep in mind that Stuart is not a high level employee, so I guess he does not fully represent PB. However, he is on the frontline of player contact and as you can see he is completely refusing to provide tangible evidence supporting several hardware bans which occurred in a few weeks for several members of this clan.
The only evidence he cites is that a player named Bulldozer was kicked several times by PB. This has nothing to do with hardware bans. Yesterday I got kicked by PB for r_picmip 3, for example.
In his final statement he says
None of the logged violations were on the server IP’s you listed. So you will not find anything in the logs. This is a very specific detection, that is a blatent attempt at bypassing PB. I’m sorry, but I consider this issue closed, there is nothing more I can tell you.
This is extremely unceremonious considering hardware bans effectively destroy the use of a computer in the online public gaming world. I see this somewhat as giving someone’s computer the death penalty without a trial. PB is judge, jury, and executioner.
What do you guys think?