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The only problem I've run into with BF2 is Punkbuster - I'm not certain why but the client built into the game can't update itself from a fresh install to the current version (at least it never works when I get nostalgic and install the game again). This meant I got kicked on connection from the vast majority of servers out there. After a bit of googling I ran into PBSetup which happily updated the PB files and it worked fine thereafter.

A quick googling has shown that you can still download dedicated server tools for BF2...

I haven't tried this myself, but I heard you can fix this issue by using pbsetup and refreshing your punkbuster definitions that way.
http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=pbsetup.php

The EA UK Battlefields forums are pretty good and DICE's devs pop in their quite frequently. This thread contains some good info about resolving the Win 7/Punkbuster issue.
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-2/598895-windows-7-bf2.html

Download the punkbuster service manually and see if that helps. Worked for Call of Duty 4. http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=pbsvcfaq.php

Have you tried Punkbuster?
Not for bleeding edge competative FPS, but works well on "casual" Enemy territory/Quake.
http://www.evenbalance.com/

This is not new. Nor is it more invasive than other methods. If you swear off ever playing a game that uses anti-cheat software, you will find you have very few games left to play. And the ones you do play, you will have to deal with jerks ruining the game for everyone else.

I found that updating Punkbuster manually has cleared up a lot of the random disconnect problems I was having. Download pbweb.exe and run it from the game's \pb directory.

http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=updatepb .php

The most bizzare one, in my opinion, is Battlefield 1942,

It's not really too wierd- it's actually a preview of the "remote attestation" features you may get from "Trusted Computing" next decade.

Battlefield 1942, like all online games using the PunkBuster anti-cheating library, needs admin rights so that it can examine every other program you are running, in case any of them is meant to help you cheat.

By running a game like that, you are not only giving that software full control of your computer, but also allowing the publishers to remote-control your PC whenever they like. TCPA may make this behavior more elegant and compartmentalized.

"Is Punkbuster spyware?"
short answer: no

Long answer:
The description of how the software works sounds like a perfect setup for installing spyware, but I cannot find any documented reports.
perfect setup how? because... its a program?

It's anticheat software. It's approved enough by quite a few major publishers for them to pay evenbalance to implement it. It's used on 99% of servers for most of the biggest MP games out there, despite millions of users, you yourself say you cannot find any documented reports. Punkbuster even comes with most of the game above, or comes with their patches. There is a limit to how careful you need to be without a certain modded-down 'troll' reply being justifed and fair.

Personally, for when playing it's supported games, there is no way I would play on a server that does not have PB enabled.

1. Why does PunkBuster now require players to run the game as an administrator under WinXP/2K?
   
   Because some cheats/hacks cannot be detected otherwise

I've always thought a good application of microsurgical robotics would be internet-based multi-surgeon environments.
I would think having 5 or 6 neurosurgeons working simultaneously could acheive rather extrordianry things. Say, reattachment of much beloved body parts (that's always been my favorite sugical application).
Or, multi-surgeon environments could simply make lenghty operations much more speedy (getting a surgery done as soon as safely possible is certainly benificial in most situations).
Come to think of it, why stop at 5 sugeons? make it a 64 surgeon server. I'm sure the insurance companies will love footing the bill for 64 neurosurgeons :)
Just make sure your hospital has installed punk-buster.

Obscurity is the only option in this case.

Well, no. There is one other option: strong hardware DRM, with severe criminal penalties for anyone producing a DRM circumvention device...

And actually, that's the way online gameplay is going. Half-Life2 would NOT have obscurity anyway, regardless of the code leak. The hackers would just need a few extra days to reverse-engineer the machine code before writing the cheat-modules.

Instead, most shooting games today are moving towards a solution like PunkBuster, which requires the player to allow a "trusted" 3rd party to remotely inspect your computer's memory to hunt for cheats. (In fact, Punkbuster now requires you to log in as the Windows "administrator" account before playing online!).

But, Punkbuster is doomed to eventual failure. Someone will manage to run it within a completely emulated environment that looks legit, but still allows wallhacking or aimbotting. The only way to prevent that will be strong hardware DRM. (Which is already happening with X-Box and similar)

adding punkbuster to bf1942 was just part of some grand evil conspiracy to lock linux users out.

That seems a little paranoid. But you said it, not me. I'm more of the opinion that the publishers care more about protecting their Windows customers from cheaters than the fact that a handful of Linux zealots can't play the game without rebooting.

pb won't catch those. so much for "trusted" environment huh?

So you're saying that PB doesn't work, and that evenbalance is basically defrauding Activision et al?

Maybe PB has holes in it right now, maybe not. But if it's ineffective today, Evenbalance will improve it until the holes are gone. The philosophy of PB is clearly stated on its website: "* Real-time scanning of memory by PB Client on players' computers searching for known hacks/cheats".

Translated, that means "We will 0wn your box to watch everything you do". And that's incompatible with an Open Source Windows emulator.

Most Unix systems won't get infected and cannot be infected.

It's rare, but there is such a thing as spyware for Unix. It's produced by Evenbalance.com, and distributed by the Pentagon; it's included free when you install America's Army (for Windows or Linux)

Punkbuster might have somewhat different goals and methods than the majority of spyware, but it still deserves that name. A program which allows a stranger across the internet to scan your RAM for patterns or download periodic screenshots can't be called anything but spyware.

The difference with Punkbuster, of course, is that the developer is quite open about the purpose of the spyware, and it's something the users will agree with. But still, anyone with sensitive files on a PC should be aware there are whole categories of spyware which Ad-Aware will never flag, but which might be subverted to look for passwords and usernames rather than just wallhacks and aimbots.

(Someday the FBI might visit evenbalance.com with a wiretap warrant to inspect the players of those violent, kill-trainer games for hints of terrorist-tendencies...)

Easier to play than AA (and much better, IMHO) is Battlefield 1942, particularly the free Desert Combat modern warfare mod you can download for it.

There are very few (useful) cheats, and the latest 1.6 patch includes PunkBuster and that's almost eliminated all traces of cheating. Even before PunkBuster, cheats were pretty rare, especially if you play on "pure" servers (which is most of them).

Not unlike the awesome old Team Fortress, BF1942 has a variety of classes you can play (assault, anti-armor, medic, engineer, scout, etc.) so there's a spot on the team for everyone, even those without the experience or trigger-happy twitch fingers.

And, very much unlike all other FPS games, there are vehicles. Planes, tanks, battleships, humvees, helicopters, motorcycles, artillery, etc. This, to me, add so much to the genre that I have trouble playing other FPSs without getting bored quickly. Vehicles can also be a good equalizer -- no matter how twitch fast that enemy is, if you're in a tank, and he's on foot, he's toast.

As an added bonus, you can find 64-man games pretty easily, which makes it even easier to get along without a lot of expertise. You can play a support role (engineer, medic) effectively with little practice, and so you'll be able to help your team win even while learning your skills.

You can pick up a copy in the stores for about $35-40, or online for $20 or less. There are two "offical" addons: Rode To Rome ($15) and Secret Weapons ($20), but neither are required to play. And, if you gravitate toward the DC mod (as most have, based on recent server stats), the add-ons are totally useless.

Oh, and the number one most important thing you need to work on to be good at FPS games is your config. That is, how you assign your player functions to your mouse and keyboard keys (please resist any temptation you may have to not use your mouse for looking around). Think about this carefully before you just slop something together. Otherwise you'll get used to a bad config and have trouble switching from it later when you realize that you need to be able to do action A and B together a lot, but you've got them both assigned to keys that use the same finger.

As the wise Justin Timberlake once sang, "Cry me a river." They totally and 100% gave the game away. No charge. Gratis. If you are unhappy with the product please cease playing the game immediately, uninstall the application, and return it to you point of purchase for a full refund.

Ungrateful bitch.

P.S. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory includes punkbuster so if cheating ever becomes a problem, use the methods outlined on Evenbalance.com to report your findings and complain to them. OR since the mod source is out, write your own anti-cheat. Or you know what, keep whining on random internet message boards, I'm sure that might help too and will definitely encourage other companies to give games away.

How it works is detailed here.

I'm suprised if this isn't already present in the game. The games I play (Enemy Territory and America's Army) have been a pleasure to play compared to back when cheats where prevalent (in America's Army at least).

How it works is detailed here.

I'm suprised if this isn't already present in the game. The games I play (Enemy Territory and America's Army) have been a pleasure to play compared to back when cheats where prevalent (in America's Army at least).

In looking at the linked site I noticed that their port includes a "Quake 2 Radar". This is actually constitutes a new cheat. Unfortunately "Cheating" with a GPLd client game is not new nor has to be considered as an issue. Eric S. Raymond has a really nice essay about what happened the day that ID released the Quake 1 sources to the world, and what happens constantly to every damn online game out there. Anyway, someone even thinks as going far as making you voluntarily install spyware on your pc in order to "certify" that you are not an online cheater :(. (If that's the added cost, no online games for me, thankyou).

I'm a fan of the game Urban Terror, a mod for Quake 3, and play online a fair bit (I usually run Visual Studio on one monitor, UT on the other: One good thing about being a rambo player in team survivor games is that I'm dead the majority of the time, and hence find it to actually be a remarkably productive time): While recently an anti-cheat tool, PunkBuster was added to Q3 (and it is constantly updated), there is still a serious issue of cheaters, the most common among them being wallhackers. What is a wallhacker? Well it's what was mentioned in the summary: Wire frame worlds, allowing cheating players to view other players whereever they are on the map, obviously giving a pretty clear advantage.

So what does this have to do with the honesty of surveillance? Well in team survivor when you die you can ghost other players as they move around the map, and it tends to be that wallhackers are discovered quite quickly--Their behaviour and actions in the game do not correlate with the information that they should be visually receiving (from what we can see ghosting them). Usually this quickly leads to cries of cheater and a vote to kick the offending player.

Return To Castle Wolfenstein is the best team game out there. The depth of the multiplayer game is beyond comparison. You would be amazed at the stratagy that goes into it. (picture example of a strat) RTCW is not a deathmatch.

The problem is that the people who set this service up don't really know what RTCW is all about. RTCW is a TEAM GAME. The Medics support the Lieutenants. The Engineers follow to complete the objective. The Soldiers are a special class for special situations. They all complment each other.

You can't measure performance by kill/death ratio in RTCW. The guy that goes 2-14 can be just as valueable as the guy that goes 10-7. Sometimes, not shooting the other guy and sneaking by him is a benefit in getting to the objective.

Cheating in RTCW is a non-factor. Evenbalance's Punkbuster can stop every cheat out there. It is updated frequently and can actually take a snapshot of your screen and send it to the game server admins. It also checks your games video setting to be sure you don't have an unfair advantage.

The only way this could work is if they changed it to a clan on clan system.

Clan A puts in $100.

Clan B puts in $100.

Winner get $190, service get 10.

I have been on the end of a screaming captain in a game that had no money involved. The things that came out of his mouth could offend german shizer movie star. I don't know if my family would be safe if money were on the line and I did something wrong.

Many clans have folded under pressure of competitve gaming with no money involved. Cyber Amateur League (CAL) had a league for the elite. CAL-Invitational. After its second season it had to merge with the lower division because the top teams quit.

First of all, I'm not an expert on this matter so I can't answer you definetely. Obviously there are many security holes in the game as demonstrated by the many aimbots available. PunkBuster is a technology enabling the detection of aimbot use, and the banning and kicking out of aimbot users, but does not prevent aimbot use per se. However in my knowledge there is no cheat allowing physics hacks (e.g. high jumping), so that the physics must be computed or checked server-side (?).

However, the rate at which this is done is certainly less than 125 times per second. Given a ballistic trajectory (e.g. a player during a jump), the trajectory could be checked by the server but the actual position occupied by the player along that trajectory is updated at the frame rate. At 125 FPS, given the standard height at which each player can jump in Quake, the player actually is able to be during one frame at the apogee of the trajectory, which is not the case at other framerates. Thus, certain items in certain maps for example are only reachable if your framerate is exactly 125 FPS.

Thus, the physics doesn't really change with the framerate. It's the way the "world" is sampled (trajectories, etc.) that is the problem here. And this is done client-side. You can decouple the two in single-player mode (i.e. position updated at 125 Hz, but screenshots generated at 50 Hz), but in multiplayer, by default, servers do not allow this.

Sorry I can't be more precise... Do a search for "Quake 3 trickjumping" to now more about this, since many "trickjumps" in Quake necessitate the 125 FPS framerate.

It's not Bad Software Engineering, its cheating.

Download Punk Buster, please.

Heh, did anyone else see "CS Cheaters" and automatically think "Counter-Strike cheaters?" Maybe a sign I've been out of school for a while...or maybe there are some of you currently in school who thought the same thing. ;-)

For those of you who may not have heard of it, PunkBuster is one of the leaders in trying to stop online cheating. It first gained popularity for Counter-Strike use, but it seems that id is going to work with the guys for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Interview here

Punkbuster

Paladin

I may have forgotten some, but these are the main ones.

What ? Offtopic ? Surely sire you jest !

Yes, but Evenbalance is now supporting Punkbuster for RTCW, and not Half-Life/Conterstrike. All the cheaters made multiplayer Half-Life a waste of time. Also, RTCW multiplayer is better by virtue of its populatrity. With online games, it is often the cluster of people around the game, rather than the game itself that is most important. (Of course, if the game sucked, you'd never good sized group of people in the first place.)

Good point. I know a 4th year student who doesn't know C, but watch out his Counter-Strike skills are amazing.

Sigh... when will schools implement the other kind of cheating detector?