First off, thank you for providing some nice, well admined server for the public to play on.  People often forget that public servers are being paid by people like BK.  Thanks.

I have been gaming on your WaW servers for a while now and have noticed some hackers on your servers lately.  Some get banned, some do not. PBBans and Punksbusted provide a great FREE service to help people keep their servers cheater free.  For CoD:WaW it is pretty simple, but BF:BC 2 it is a tad more complicated due to DICE's restrictions on servers, but not too hard really.  I would highly recommend using it.  It will automatically kick people it finds with known hacks.  I know you guys use codrcon tool to admin and ban players from your servers.  It is a great tool and you can use it as well as streaming and nothing will concflict.  But, what PB streaming helps is that it keeps known hackers out of all PB streaming server so if someone gets caught on another server, they won't be able to join your server if streaming is active.  When you catch someone on your server, you can help get them banned from all streaming servers with a few additional steps.  Really, decent tools that makes Punkbuster much stronger than a server that still has PB enable but not streaming.

I am attaching a PDF guide that I wrote for XPL (league that I help run - used to be head of the anti-cheat department now part of corporate) that gives step by step instructions, and I am also attaching some of the necessary files you will need to help out.  If you have any question, I am more than willing to help you out.  As far as BF:BC 2 is concerned, I am not too familiar with it but I do have people that work for me at XPL that can help you guys out as well. Just let me know.


Thanks again for providing great public servers. Just trying to help you guys give even better service to the public players.  

Cheers,
Adam "PooheD" S.
Xtreme Professional League

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Thanks for the offer of help and playing on our servers.. We do not use these programs because they slow down the servers and make them appear to be laggy. We have also had a problem with ex BK members banning BK threw this in a effort to prevent them from using any servers. With out any over sights of who can ban who programs like this turn into mob rule and incant people get hurt far to often.

We do our best to help keep our admins up to date on what to look for and keep our servers updated.

GOA.Luke*BK*

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Luke wrote (View Post):

Thanks for the offer of help and playing on our servers.. We do not use these programs because they slow down the servers and make them appear to be laggy. We have also had a problem with ex BK members banning BK threw this in a effort to prevent them from using any servers. With out any over sights of who can ban who programs like this turn into mob rule and incant people get hurt far to often.

We do our best to help keep our admins up to date on what to look for and keep our servers updated.

GOA.Luke*BK*

Well, if you properly configure the streaming in the config files and your account settings on either Site, you should not have much lag.  You can also turn off the auto  PB Screenshot function if you are not going to check SS for hacks (most hacking software bypass this in the first place).   Streaming uses the native Punkbuster already installed on server.  You are just asking your server mainly to send  data and sometimes receive data by having them PB Stream..  However, if your servers are on a highly used server box (too many servers running off one server box - Gamerservers.com like to do that, but you just have to request them to help you to get your server on a not so highly used box).  Now I mainly play on your CoD:WaW servers and if you run your lagometer (cg_drawLagometer "1"), your WaW #1 server does show some stress already on it.  If you are not familiar with reading the CoD lagometer, top Blue/Yellow is how your computer is rendering graphics (Yellow=Bad).  The bottom Green/Yellow/Red is how the server is communicating.  Green is good and the height of the green is dependent on ping.  Yellow  and red spikes mean damaged or broken packets and lost packets or packet loss respectively.  This information is about the person viewing the lagometer.  But, if multiple people are getting yellow and red packets, it typically means your server is having issues. Your WaW#1 typically gives me and my friends (me, FOS and friends fast DSL and cable from various providers) yellow.  Usually, a reboot of the server helps solve it, but if not then server provider needs to help out.  For BF:BC 2, streaming and PB initially was causing server lag but supposedly (I don't have BF:BC 2 due to my computer desperately needing an upgrade) DICE fixed it in latest server patch.   Again, it is all on how you configure Punkbuster on your server.

Now as far as trying to ban BK people, that is not possible unless your BK players are playing with a CD key/Punkbuster GUID that has been caught cheating or were actively caught cheating with a known hack, and Punkbuster already does that for you by having PB enabled on your server. . PBBans and Punksbusted (PsB) just gather data from those Punkbuster bans as a global banlist to make hacking more of a deterrent and provide some other additional features as well.  The demo and PB SS submital process are the added features that help make policing for hackers much stronger before Evenbalance updates their known hacks database.  Evenbalance often waits a long time before updating their hack list to catch more people.  Sometimes that can be months of letting a hack run rampant through the community, and using PBBans and PsB usually might only be weeks.   Both PBBans and PsB do have a moderated process that reviews submitted demos and PB screenshots to determine if the person is cheating.  It has to be fairly obvious to get banned that way.  Each group has an appeals process as well.  I have worked extremely close with both organizations and can tell you they provide professional and just service.  There is a reason XPL and other competition sites require competitions for PB enabled games to stream to both PBBans and PsB.

The decision is definitely up to you since you pay for the servers, you get to run them as you see fit.  I will still play on your servers.  I just wanted to give you a suggestion to help out.  I am just a strong supporter of these sites and grossly detest hackers.  When my clan (now defunct and just a few of us get on to play with each other on public servers) had servers, we used streaming and caught quite a few hackers in the time and then help keep them off other streaming servers.  They really take the fun out of people's hobby/stress reliever.

Cheers.

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I think the key thing you said is that well using it you will not get "much lag". We work hard to keep our servers as lag free as possible and cheaters. Using programs like this lags servers well not greatly but it adds lag to the server. We have members from all over the world including New Zealand to Poland and everything in between adding lag to their play could be the difference from being able to play on a server and not being able to play. We will continue to do our best to offer as close to 24/7 admin coverage as we can. I know there maybe gaps but I believe we do a very good job at it.

GOA.Luke*BK*

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