Hi and advice Options

[Silence]

Hi guys, Oldliner Silence here, I have your server in my favourites and have seen a few of you guys around. Thought I would pop by and say thanks and great job on your server.

I feel kinda guilty though, after all I have been meaning to do this for a while, yet I was prompted today through more selfish reasons, I was playing this afternoon and over the course of around 3 hours watched 5 people banned by "punkbuster"? automatically on your server. I first found your server as we both have servers with multiplay.co.uk. So my question was, what plugin /addon are you using to detect these cheats, as I have never seen PB ban anyone.

I noticed recently some more PB settings on the clanforge interface, are you using one of these, or something total uniuqe?

Anyway great job guys, love the server, and thanks in advance for your responses

If you ever feel like beating the shite outta old people, www.oldliners.co.uk are looking for relaxed friendlys

[MonkeyFiend]

Hi,

Welcome to the site.... firstly my response depends on how nerdy you want to go

The plugins on clanforge are perfectly fine, however there's some tweaks you might want.

Stock PB without modification will ban players on the server, upload specific bans to Evenbalance and enforce other bans from evenbalance - these types of ban tend to be the more serious e.g. hacks that interfere with PB operation. Will call these type 1. Essentialy these are global bans.

Next PB will ban for specific other hacks, aimbots and the like. However the player will then be banned from only your server and free to join other servers. Will call these Type 2

The next step is ban streaming, where bans made on your server are uploaded to a common database.. most commonly Pbbans.com and Punksbusted. So any of the type 2 bans above that you have get centrally stored and that player will be banned on any other servers that participate in this type of streaming. Likewise a player banned for a type 2 hack on another streaming server will be banned on yours.

Additionally some players may be manually added to the PsB and pbbans streaming ban list with other proof - commonly Punkbuster screenshots taken in game.

I personally prefer Pbbans over all the other ban site (with PsB coming in second) - it's worth creating and account at pbbans, adding your server there and getting to know some of the guys (they tend to check you out on your intiial application). It also gives you access to the pbbans hub, where the ban management hub can interact with your server e.g. providing an in-game message about a player banned for aimbotting (like you saw on ours ) or greetings for specific players etc.,

That should cover you for most eventualities


thx,

MonkeyFiend



P.S. a much more advanced option using md5tool checks - most hacks interfere with files or add new files into the game. MD5 tools are a function of punkbuster that allows checking the integrity of a file based on it's hash value (a vlaue calculated from the file itself) - any modification to the file changes this hash value. Hence if everyone is playing with the same files on BC2 the hashes should all be the same, if someone joins a server and their BC2.exe file has a different hash, then it means the file has been modified: likely that they're up to no good. It also works for the presnence of certain known bad files.. an example as below:

pb_sv_md5tool w "" v "Crosshair version 3.exe" SZ0 AT4096 LEN32 NOT_FOUND

or for modified legit files:

pb_sv_md5tool a "1.1.2965-797.0" v CoreDLL.dll SZ1191346 AT0 LEN2048 BB24F4AFCE65EB0F9225B3724E7EE23E

This is a much more advanced topic and would probably be best discussed off the public boards if you're interested in this specific area