By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
mornelithe said:
DamnTastic said:
the fuck is punkbuster

It's basically a 3rd party hacking/cheating detection application, that many PC games use to police servers.  It's constantly updated, and when you're added to the master ban list, your IP is effectively fucked.

If you're getting PB issues and you haven't cheated, there's something you need to update, basically.  Personally, I love it.  I've never had an issue with PB that wasn't my fault.  For example, I used to frequent a Sniper's only server in CoD 2 that used a different UI and had wider angle scopes than what the game normally allows.  Whenever I went to the One X servers, I'd have to make a few alterations and turn PB off.  Whenever I wanted to go back, I'd have to revert the alterations back to normal, and turn PB back on.

It's a really helpful app, imo.  There're so many cheaters out there on PC (and console for that matter), since most MP games don't have client side admin tools, you have to wait for some asshole at EA/Ubisoft/Activision etc... to get off their asses and do it for you.  PB takes care of the 'known' hacks/transgressors.


Something like what he described is the perfect example of how someone could get banned that isn't actually cheating, because they forgot to turn off server specific functionality when rejoining back to a vanilla server.  For every 1 occurence of this there are 750-1000 (just a guess) legitimate hacking bans that PB hands out.  Also, something like what he described would never get you a Global permaban stopping you from playing an entire game.