A Major Step Forward in the Fight Against Cheaters with Auto-MBL

[CaptainCox]

New gadgets from PB to chew on guys.

"This is a fully automated, secure, realtime spooling of the PunkBuster logs directly from your server to the master database. It stops cheaters in their tracks across a large number of game servers."


"What Does this mean?
1) Cheaters detected by PunkBuster software from all of our admin member servers, are collected, sorted and updated to the Master Ban List (MBL) automatically.
2) Your server’s ban list is automatically updated and kept current with our automated download feature at a time and period of your choosing. A cheater caught today will not be playing within hours on all servers using the MBL, Period!
3) The AMBL FTP updating software is available for both Windows and Linux-based servers. (Or update manually, if the auto-updating feature is not possible with your server operation directly).
4) Screen shot MD5 checksums and timestamp are automatically stored in our repository, so that there will never again be a doubt as to the authenticity of a PB screen shot. It eliminates accusations of fake screen shots. PunksBusted’s repository will verify it’s integrity without question. "


Read more on
http://www.punksbusted.com/

[Spontaneous]

Ok a couple things about this.

The Master Ban List they are talking about is not the one through PB but the one through punkbusted.com which is not the punkbuster people.
There is a seperate program that needs to be ran in the background of the server to send the info to punksbusted.com. This means only the very few servers that run this program will get the MBL and update it. Only about 10% of the servers out there even know about punksbusted.com so I dont expect to be that much of a problem.

[CaptainCox]

Lets hope you are right, and I guess one should not play to obvious when using a hack anyway=less chance to get cought=).

[Spontaneous]

Well lets see, I am part of their little admin community(they dont know who I really am there) and I can tell you that their is not many admin in their little community that are working on the MBL

[caliber1942]

it's still a move in a direction that hurts us as a game hacking/tweaking community- thanks for the info capt. cox-

[CaptainCox]

Just a question, maybee Spontaneous knows the awnser.
Lets say you get cought on a SS and are banned from that perticular server, what are they logging you on?, name, IP or what?

[caliber1942]

it is still your GUID that is calculated by the PB software and is based on your CD KEY. so i don't think your IP is banned but I could be wrong. I thought that everything was based on the GUID. not sure if the name of your player has anything to do with it, but it is possible. seems like a stupid way to ban people (based solely on name).

[Spontaneous]

well their ban list is just guids. It is possibly on some servers through the server manager to ban by IP or ban a name, but these 2 ways are not spread ammoung the admin people.

[CaptainCox]

Reason why I asked is that my Brother got a bit carried away yesterday, I think he had something like 50 points and the next guy had like 16= VERRY SUSPICIOUS!
He got kicked from that perticular server, probably a SS.
Today he tried to get in and he got "Banned from Server"

Tough luck Bro=)

While we are at it, what about auto SS, does a lot of servers have this function and if yes how exactly does it work, 1 SS per game or do they take several like in the begining of a map, middle and so on?

And second, would it be possible to make the arrows in the minmap like a slight different red, just a littlebit, I am not sure but if the arrow would have a verry small collor deviation enough for you to see, would that show up on a SS due to bad res?
Maybe it is stupid but just a thought.

[caliber1942]

i think we had said this before, that obvious cheating (even when undetected by pb) is going to get you caught or kicked. unbelievably high scores or nonstop kills on people from out of nowhere is likely to be suspicious like capt.cox said. play however you want, but just know that you are more likely to be caught that way.