Punk Buster Screen shotts!

(_NeT_WalBanger) #1

Ok it might be me doing something wrong but…

When i take screen shots of people on our server (the pb ones that upload to Server) it only takes 1 in 10 correctly…

I dont understand, this has got to be the best way of making sure games are fair… and yet it dosnt work 100% of time (not even 10%) :’(

I thought this would of been worked on and sorted out so it worked at LEAST 80-90% of time if not 100%.

Is there anything that can be done to improve this?

Now i been told it has something to do with the Users coputer big good or not…
But it fails to get mine most of the time, and i have:-

Athlon XP 3200+ barton
2gb of XMS corsair ram
GeForce FX5900
1.5mg BroadBand
and 20Gb spare on my 70Gb Hard Drive (140 split in 2)

(ouroboro) #2

there are several cheats which defeat the screenshot feature and serve up black screens or the same innocent screen every time, etc.

run etpro, use the most bleeding edge cheat database, run league cvar enforcements, make use of the punksbusted Auto MBL, set etpro to kick for anything but clean, regularly check screenshots and add black screens to your ban list…

i can already hear the replies from ppl who cant seem to shake their [??? linux] status, or someone who gets black shots and doesnt know why… frankly i’m unmoved. fix what ails you or sayonara, bub. there are thousands of servers run by slacker admins for the likes of these ppl. i personally would welcome a server with a truly medieval admin; i would run headlong into it’s warm embrace and snuggle at it’s loving busom - for i am clean as a virgin’s honeypot and make it my business to stay that way.

just get draconian, that’s all u can do.

(SCDS_reyalP) #3

ROFL, you are saying he should ban himself. That goes to show just how silly your little rant is. Randomly banning based on buggy software isn’t going to achieve anything. If you ban a cheater that way it will only be by luck. You might as well just ban every 3rd player from your server…

PBs screenshot feature has always been craptastic. I recall rain telling me he had something like 30% failure rate in RTCW (which had VERY few cheats for most of it’s life). You can use it for postive verification (i.e., you see a cheat, you can say for sure the person is cheating), but trying to use it for anything else is silly.

(Rain) #4

I found some old logs from my RtCW server, and I had an outright failure rate of 21.4% (N=1648). Oh, and one screenshot from someone connected to an entirely different server. (PB apparently took the screenshot on one server, the player connected to mine before it uploaded, and PB merrily sent it to me.) To get a success rate that high, I specifically timed screenshots to be taken immediately after a player joined a team. Success rate will go way down if you try to capture multiple screenshots at once (e.g. you’ll be lucky to get a single good screenshot if you just do ‘pb_sv_getss’ on a full server.)

As far as received-but-black screenshots, those weren’t too frequent, but it’s quite possible PB’s behavior has changed since the last time I ran a popular server (a while ago.) I often returned black screenshots or no screenshot at all in RtCW (on my own server), and I can assure you I wasn’t cheating. :wink:

I sincerely wish blank screenshots were a usable reason to consider banning people, but they’ve always been too broken to be useful. I’ve whined about it, but it hasn’t made any difference. The going rumour is that at least one cheat can return clean screenshots now, anyway, so the PB screenshot facility may be on its way to losing that last little bit of usefulness.

(_NeT_WalBanger) #5

damn this is a shame…

when playing 6v6 clan match or similar it would be so good/easy just to take the shots. Bind it to a key and just press 1 key half way through a match or something…

Who has control over this??? is it PB, Bani ect? (i mean on improving it or not)

(mouse) #6

Minimize ET (with a minimizer program), let pb make a screenshot, and you get exactly the same file as some hacks that block pb screenshots (see this cheater caught @ bio: http://www.rebirthinc.co.uk/comment.php?comment.news.176 ). Black screenshots / Screenshot application failure shots are NOT an indication of a cheat.

(ouroboro) #7

ROFL, you are saying he should ban himself. That goes to show just how silly your little rant is. Randomly banning based on buggy software isn’t going to achieve anything. If you ban a cheater that way it will only be by luck. You might as well just ban every 3rd player from your server…

PBs screenshot feature has always been craptastic. I recall rain telling me he had something like 30% failure rate in RTCW (which had VERY few cheats for most of it’s life). You can use it for postive verification (i.e., you see a cheat, you can say for sure the person is cheating), but trying to use it for anything else is silly.

the way you belittle others with “roffles” and “rolling eyes” here and at etpro is really making me standoffish regarding you. try to debate in a mature fashion please. laughing at ppl and calling them names isn’t likely to encourage them to continue a discussion. i understand you consider yourself superior to nearly everyone you speak with - at least that’s the impression one gets reading most of your discussions - but even if you WERE superior, a bit of humility would go a long ways to make you a more attractive partner in conversation. i almost stopped reading after the ROFL, but decided to give you the courtesy of looking past the acid comments to look for some relevance, yet again…

anywho, as i said before, there are ~3000 et servers, the majority of which run etpro. if a small handfull were to get ruthless like i described, those of us who would welcome such a policy would be able to happily play there - your server selection wouldn’t decrease in the slightest. why you seem to have such a seething disdain for me and my comments is beyond me, but the bottom line is: you wouldn’t have to play on those servers.

there are hundreds of us who, like me, are verifiably pristine. no black shots, no failed shots, nothing but clean in etpro, not a single PB kick in our playing career. what’s the big deal if we wanted to gather together for a completely sterile game? you can still go slumming in the bad neighborhoods all you want.

peace.

(Sauron|EFG) #8

How do you know that?

And yes, you telling _NeT_WalBanger to ban himself is funny. :slight_smile:

(ouroboro) #9

And yes, you telling _NeT_WalBanger to ban himself is funny.

thanks, i aim to please :slight_smile:

(funkPig) #10

ouroboro ,
I feel like you are missing the point. There is a 30% chance everytime PB takes a screen shot that it will come back black. This is for everyone, including you. If you start banning for every black screenshot you will eventually ban everyone that plays there (including you). Not much fun playing on a server with 0 people on it (unless you really like winning)

consider this: a spam filter that gets 30% false positive. You decide to ban those addresses without any other research. Ban: there goes your mom, best friend …eventually everyone because 1/3 of the email they send you WILL be classified as spam and BANNED by you.

blank screen shots are not definitive and cannot be used to prove anything. Good screen shots though, can prove whether someone is cheating though.

oh, you and SCDS_reyalP may have a long standing feud, but your proposal is rather funny, because hewould be banning himself AND he would no longer have anyone playing on that server.

(SCDS_reyalP) #11

ouroboro

You keep proposing draconian measures which are ineffective against cheating, but will penalize lots of ordinary players. It’s akin to putting every third person in jail, because they might be a criminal. Sure, you will get a lot of criminals. You will also get a lot of innocent people. Cheaters suck. I hate em. But blindly lashing out based on buggy software is silly. Even with your draconian measures, anyone with half a clue and google could still cheat on your servers, but lots of less technically inclined players would not be able to play. Furthermore, the real cheaters you did catch could get a new guid and be back in a few minutes.

I will continue to rofl and roll my eyes at such nonsense. If you can’t figure out why it is nonsense, I really don’t care what you think of me or my attitude.

Your claim that your pb SS always work and you have never been kicked by PB is a good example of nonsense. If you play for any significant amount of time, that odds against that are huge. Heck, I’ve even seen pb kick people whose systems had crashed for ‘video driver hack’ (with personal knowledge that they were not hacking, and that their system had crashed at that time, and that when their system wasn’t crashing, pb didn’t complain), never mind the common ones like ‘game integrity’ and ‘no packet flow’

(ouroboro) #12

as i said, the servers adopting my way of thinking would (obviously) be very small. you would likely never even encounter one. enjoy your current server selection, GL & HF. i’ll be on the one or two who think like me (if they were to ever crop up).

again, i’ve played ET since the day it was released as a standalone, for a guestimated average of several hours per day, taking into account a week or two off now and then, usually followed by an intense ET fest.

in short, i play the living hell out of this game. it is my primary pastime.

-----> and again i state and affirm: i have never been kicked from a server by PB. whether you care to believe me based on your vague statistical assumptions is irrelevant - i’ve never been kicked. it may be due to the fact that i am particularly anal about keeping my system clean, up to date and well maintained - and perhaps i’ve been lucky.

as for the screenshots, i play on a very small selection of servers and have been allowed to review the shots on a handfull of them on a few occasions. based on my observations there, as well as my own tests on my own local servers, having never seen a failed or black shot of myself, i can safely extrapolate that i am clean in that regard as well. at any rate, my extrapolation is at least as scientific as yours regarding the statistical odds of my having been kicked over the course of my playing career.

happy roffling, i won’t be engaging in any future discussions if i can’t even be assured of even the most basic modicum of civility

(SCDS_reyalP) #13

But clearly your ideal would be if all servers (and leagues) implemented it, right ? Which would be damaging to the community, and not effective against stopping cheats.

again, i’ve played ET since the day it was released as a standalone, for a guestimated average of several hours per day, taking into account a week or two off now and then, usually followed by an intense ET fest.

I too have played from the first release, as well as playing RTCW from it’s first test release.

-----> and again i state and affirm: i have never been kicked from a server by PB. whether you care to believe me based on your vague statistical assumptions is irrelevant - i’ve never been kicked. it may be due to the fact that i am particularly anal about keeping my system clean, up to date and well maintained - and perhaps i’ve been lucky.

Because you never see the kick message when your computer crashes, and the fact that most of the time it tells the person who was kicked ‘unknown reason’ no matter what happened on the server (recent etpros fix this AFAIK).

as for the screenshots, i play on a very small selection of servers and have been allowed to review the shots on a handfull of them on a few occasions. based on my observations there, as well as my own tests on my own local servers, having never seen a failed or black shot of myself, i can safely extrapolate that i am clean in that regard as well.

Did you read rains post ? Are you claiming that he is lying ? Or do you assume that all those people were actually cheating ? Just because you happen to be lucky and have a system that normally returns screenshots, doesn’t mean that everyone is. Nor does it mean that there aren’t legitmate things that will cause an SS to fail.

You are in essance saying that "my system works OK, so everyones could’’. Even if the first part is true, it doesn’t imply the second.

(ouroboro) #14

“Because you never see the kick message when your computer crashes, and the fact that most of the time it tells the person who was kicked ‘unknown reason’ no matter what happened on the server (recent etpros fix this AFAIK).”

for the third and final time: i’ve never been kicked by PB. i know what the kick messages are - i’ve read the PB docs. the only time i’ve ever been disconnected from a server was when voted off by other players or kicked manually by an admin i was having words with.

“Did you read rains post ? Are you claiming that he is lying ? Or do you assume that all those people were actually cheating ? Just because you happen to be lucky and have a system that normally returns screenshots, doesn’t mean that everyone is. Nor does it mean that there aren’t legitmate things that will cause an SS to fail.”

i’m a Rain fanboy :smiley: if i had to have sex with a man, i’d have sex with Rain. that has nothing to do with my personal screenshot experiences. are YOU saying that Rain’s experience is the DE-FACTO experience? i don’t believe Rain claimed such, and neither am i. i’m telling you what my experience has been. it obviously differs from yours, for whatever reasons…

"You are in essance saying that “my system works OK, so everyones could’’. Even if the first part is true, it doesn’t imply the second.”

there’s no “if” about it - the first part is true (as near as i have been able to ascertain - subject to a margin of error i will grant you). all i’m saying is that those handfull of fortunate people like myself would probably welcome a server which enforced our level of good graces.

“But clearly your ideal would be if all servers (and leagues) implemented it, right ?”

left. see above. all servers implementing ideas as strict as mine will never happen. it’s too much work and (obviously) too much controversy. that shouldn’t stop a few admins from doing it if they so choose, however. i know that some clans are quite strict in their server rules. as i stated before, i’ve been kicked by admins after arguing about what exactly constitutes spawn killing, for example. other servers don’t even enforce any cvars on their servers. there is already a wide range of server stringency to choose from. since we have one end of the extreme covered quite nicely (unpure shrub servers with PB off and all shrub gheyness enabled, for example) - so why not a few servers at the other end of the spectrum?

i don’t see what your objection to this would be. is it because you are afraid you would be excluded from such an exclusive club?

(Sauron|EFG) #15

You are of course welcome to pay for your own server and enforce those rules, but as long as you argue that other people should do it you’ll get objections.

I envy you for never having a single crash or lockup in ET, I’ve had plenty although I also keep my system absolutely clean. I even got kicked for game integrity once when I connected just before a map change (I think it was; it loaded 2 different maps before kicking me). Both my current ATI system and my previous nVidia system locks up occasionally with certain GFX drivers.

P.S. Anyone knows what the server says about a client that crashes because of the download bug?

(SCDS_reyalP) #16

I don’t see what your objection to this would be. is it because you are afraid you would be excluded from such an exclusive club?

No. My objection is that what you are promoting is obviously pointless and harmful. Even if your rather unbelievable claims of your personal experience are correct, you are clearly ignorant of how often PB messes up.

Banning people for random software fuckups is stupid. I don’t know why you can’t understand that, nor any polite way of saying it, but I will do my best to point it out whenever you suggest it.

Sauron|EFG :
Usually authentication failure, or no packet flow. I’ve seen other download messups result in ‘game integrity’

(ouroboro) #17

“I envy you for never having a single crash or lockup in ET”

i’ve had hundreds. i said i’ve never been kicked by PB.

“Even if your rather unbelievable claims of your personal experience are correct, you are clearly ignorant of how often PB messes up.”

again, there is no “if”. please let that sink in. i am not you. i am me. and i am fully aware of how often PB messes up - for most people.

“what you are promoting is obviously pointless and harmful”

again, not at all pointless or harmfull, assuming only people who would be able to play on such servers would bother trying. i suppose if you’re the type who will raise a stink and take to the streets with a picket sign if you find a single server that gives you trouble, we may have problems…

“I don’t know why you can’t understand that, nor any polite way of saying it, but I will do my best to point it out whenever you suggest it.”

i understand it fully, yet i still maintain that the theoretical existence of draconian servers for those players who can pass the muster should in no way threaten or frighten you. my idea is certainly no more pointless than the existence of sv_pure 0 shrub servers with no PB and every shrub “feature” cranked up to 11, is it? i presume you wouldn’t touch such a server with somebody elses ten foot pole, yet their existence doesn’t have you up in arms. i must be missing something…

your side of this argument is basically thus: “other nations drive on the opposite side of the road than we do in my country. i cannot allow this to exist, on the odd chance that i may find myself in said nation and be unable to drive”

you don’t want a hardcore server to exist even though you said yourself you wouldn’t want to play there. i don’t see the logic, aside from you being a possible control freak?

(Kendle) #18

ouroboro, I think ReyalP’s point is that the existence of such a server would be pointless, as it would not be able to serve it’s intended purpose (by virtue of the fact that innocent players can be kicked by PB and/or return blank screenies (I’ve had both happen to me, and I hope you can accept I’ve never even thought about downloading a cheat, let alone ever done so )).

A sv_pure 0 Shrub server with every option enabled wouldn’t be pointless because there might conveivably be players idiotic enough to play on it and there would be nothing preventing them from doing so.

(ouroboro) #19

you missed my point as well. if there are others like me who’ve had no PB problems, there would be nothing preventing us from playing on said server. it would essentially be an exclusive club, only for those who qualified. that’s more or less what a passworded clan server is - if you can’t make the grade, you can’t play there. well, let’s say a handfull of us lucky ones wanted to all play on the same server and lock the sucker down tighter than a frog sphincter - what’s the problem with that? you may or may not believe that anyone could possibly be able to play on such a server because of the bad luck you’ve had with your system, but i assure you we really do exist :slight_smile:

(Kendle) #20

Sorry my friend, but you’re wrong. There would (potentially) be something preventing you from playing on said server, namely the fact that, according to your spec, anyone who returns a blank PB screenie gets banned.

Even you can, and somtimes possibly do, return blank screenies. Not because you cheat and not because your PC isn’t in tip-top condition, but simply because PB is borked and there’s nothing you can do about it.