Punkbuster

(MOOOO) #1

Anyone else having problems with punkbuster, my console gets spammed with empty cdkey and i get kicked from every server.

(leifhv) #2

Yeah, it seems to be a global problem…don’t know what is happening.

(Ragnar_40k) #3

Same here: http://forum.splatterladder.com/index.php?showtopic=1188

(Floris) #4

Same here and with a lot of other guys

(MadMattUK) #5

yep me too :frowning:

NW & ABS were supposed to be playing a friendly tonight, disabled Punkbuster and we are all still getting kicked by PB for empty CD-Key error???!!!

(Ragnar_40k) #6

New version 1.1185 is supposed to fix it: http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=support-et.php

(Sauron|EFG) #7

Yes, running pbweb fixed it for me. (/pb_webupdate is supposed to do the same thing but did not work at all for me.)

(Juno_Who) #8

Punkbuster released an update that deleted a players GUID/ETkey if connected when they enabled the update. They have since released a fix to the origianl maintainance release. The first release was quite a server clearer. It kicked everyone for prior kick/ban.

(MOOOO) #9

ok i got the update and now its fine, although you would think they tested their damn updates b4 they released it.

(Lekdevil.NL) #10

I’d like to add one other thing that might be useful to players. Even Balance released two PB client versions in quick succession. The PB auto-update system, whilst generally working fine, does not always handle this kind of a release schedule too gracefully.

It is possible that some servers still only have updated to the first client release, whilst the players’ clients only have the security information (as stored in your pbcl.db file) of the second client release. This will result in “PB client in distress” or “PB init faillure” error messages. Manually updating the client will not solve this issue; it is the game servers that need to be updated. Typing \pb_security 0 in the console after connecting to such a not-updated game server is a workaround to avoid getting kicked.

Something to keep in mind.

(KillerWhale) #11

If the servers are not updated yet, all the clients should revert to the old version while on that server. The clients will spam that the servers punkbuster is outdated but they should be fine.

(Lekdevil.NL) #12

Well, almost. A client will revert to the older version if and only if the MD5 checksum (a.k.a. “security information”) of that client version is present in the pbcl.db file. As the PB master only provides the checksums of the latest PB versions, this means that clients that weren’t on-line when the 1.184 version was current, don’t have the MD5’s for that version. Hence, when connecting to a game server that tries to offer PB client version 1.184, that client will go into distress (meaning it can’t validate the client version that the server wants it to run) and will get kicked. As I mentioned earlier, this is mostly a problem when multiple versions are released in a short timeframe (i.e. within one day or so).

HTH.

(maarten144) #13

so what do we do? wait?

(MOOOO) #14

i just ran pbweb sevral times to make sure it was updated. Now everthing is owkring ok 4 me

(maarten144) #15

jup me 2 :slight_smile: its all autoupdated