oh great, the witch hunt begins. lets tie those trolls to stakes and burn them alive. Whether the person was a troll or not the points he made in the OP and the poll brought up legitimate concerns. It looks bad imo when a game company has threads that are giving feedback on game features locked and distorted by its moderators.
Legitimate concerns?
In the recent years there have been development of monitoring software that tracks and monitors cheat busting software like punkbuster , and it black lists players the software deems to be "cheating" regardless if they were cheating or not.
On of these programs is called PBbans.
PBBans is not a piece of software it is a third party (to PunkBuster) streaming service which utilizes PBUCON streaming technology.
Essentially streamed log data is sent from a server to PBBans and then parsed by our PBBHub to be displayed throughout our MPi, MBi, etc where appropriate.
PBbans runs through punk buster , it monitors punkbuster and makes decisions that often ends up blacklisting players from every single server that uses PBbans , which in some communities is quite huge. Most of these players are indeed cheaters , but there have been countless instances of innocent gamers being thrown onto this blacklist with seemingly no reason in sight , a simple google search will tell you their stories better than i can.
The entire concept of streaming servers to an anti-cheat organisation is that if you get caught on one server you get banned from them all. That's the consequence of cheating.
There are different types of bans which end up on our MBi, either EvenBalance (PunkBuster) violations or what we class as PBBans violations - bans resulting from our own MD5/CVAR detections or through submitted demo evidence.
All bans resulting from EvenBalance violations can be appealed with us and EvenBalance at the same time - their decision then determines if the ban stays or goes.
All bans resulting from PBBans' violations can be appealed with us and are reviewed by a number of Ban Managers, inconclusive bans will be removed without question.
What is worse about PBbans are the people who run it. They are not responsible individuals and completely lack the quality control to have so much power over so many servers and players. In the past PBbans have held clans hostage because they deemed one of their players to be a "cheater" and unless the clan kicked out the player , PB bans would ACTUALLY BLOCK THEIR SERVER from passing punkbuster.
Well I don't want to seem biased but the other people running PBBans are some of the best people that I've ever had dealings with online. There are around 20 staff that dedicate their own time to supporting cheat free environments across the globe. We continue to do so despite unfactual and ill opinions of the service when they do rarely appear (typically we get confused with PunkBuster but forward people in the right direction) furthermore we frequently get DDoS attacked and where we know who's responsible we pursue them through criminal complaints to law enforcement agencies.
We have a simple policy that no clan may harbour individuals who are on the MBi - we only pursue our policies where we are firmly seated and have conclusive evidence to do so.
Being as we're a third party we don't have an ability to effect PunkBuster on the scale mentioned, however we are firmly within our rights to block someone from streaming to us.
Their motto is "guilty until proven innocent". And its quite obvious they stand true to this concept because thousands of people have been barred from thousands of servers in an instant due to terrible software quality control , and on top of it corrupt server admins abusing the power of the software and getting people blacklisted intentionally , sometimes with no reason.
Actually 'Always Quality over Quantity'... don't think this bit needs elaboration. Evidence?
So I ask you fans of red orchestra , would you sacrifice your ability to play red orchestra to ensure that cheaters stay away?
o.0 maybe the question should be are you prepared to experience the BFP4F experience with cheaters because of a lack in anti-cheat?
Or should server admins simply ban problematic users instead of using this lazy , dangerous , and proven to be ineffective software to do the administration for them?
Again a lack in evidence or supportive details for a point.
Given the guy is 'On Vacation' I doubt we'll have any come back on his points from him. PBBans is more than happy to discuss it's operations in a transparent fashion however we will also respond to 'attacks' such as this with facts.
