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Player vs. Player Play Examined
aws910 writes "An interesting story at news.com.com tells of the various efforts employed by various MMOG companies to abate the problem of Griefers." From the article: "Social miscreants can do more than ruin the game for better-behaved competitors. They can hurt game companies' bottom line by driving away customers and burning up support lines. Problems related to grief players often account for 25 percent or more of customer service calls, according to game publishers." Commentary from the old men of MMOGdom available at Broken Toys and Terra Nova.
PB is fine. It is used in a lot of high-profile games, gmase which wouldn't dare install spyware, lest their producer's reputation be gone forever.
Install it.
Le français vous intéresse?
Not as far as I know. It is anti cheat software supported by such big games as America's Army and others.
What it does: scans the harddrive/memory checking for known hacks and cheats. If it detects something, it tells the game server you're connected to, and the server kicks you off. It also updates itself with new cheat definitions (think virus definitions...)
Thats what I know about it
No, I don't think it is.
I think I used punkbuster a while back. It may be similar to a program called Cheating Death, which was made for Half-life mods.
Basically, it ensures that the game hasn't been tampered with. The game server admin installs a server copy of punkbuster, which queries the copy installed on your computer (client). This happens when you connect and periodically checks while playing the game. If an illegal modification is made to the game, the client will disconnect from the server, thus preventing cheating (such as aimbots, transparent walls, etc).
I recommend using some kind of anti-cheat software. The servers that have anti-cheat measures installed are generally a lot more fun to play on.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
I've put some thought to this kind of stuff going on in games. Here's some of my ideas contrasted with what games actually do:
;) You could get around it if you're Star Wars, and implement a version following the Light/Dark side concept of Knights of the Old Republic.
1) Religious alignment system (think DandD style with gods/goddesses representing alignments). "Good" players received the protection of their appropriate gods, say protection from corpse looting. "Evil" players received other rewards and protections, but not protection from looting (thus their reign of terror ends when a dozen good characters stand up to them). Changing alignment leads to temporary penalties where nobody wants to protect you. Then, players who play "good" characters can go about their lives with the occasional evil character attack (the rewards for being evil should be good enough to justify it). Evil characters (the pkillers) can spend their time killing each other for the loot. By splitting hairs farther, perhaps Lawful Good characters (who had never attacked another player) would be completely immune to pkilling, which other good players would have to hold their own or hope that they were close enough to town for the town guards to come running.
Won't fly though, people would flip out at the suggestion of religion
2) If the world was heavily magical (ie, everyone was a magician and justified this), everyone could be issed a mostly harmless pet familiar. Who would then be capable of growing into a dragon and hosing down any unwanted invitations to a duel with fire. It could be made so that pk could still be possible, but would widen the xp gap needed for griefing considerably to take on a n00b and their dragon at the same time.
A) Preventing PvP entirely outside of arenas. Easy to implement when everyone is a good guy, but what do you do if you've got a situation where players play on opposing countries/sides/whatever and fighting is expected as part of the story? This path seems to be getting taken a lot by current games.
B) Doing nothing and letting it happen. This seems to be what the other games do. I wonder if I was the only one who was annoyed by the article's advice of "Ignore them and they will go away"? When I was in elementary school, I was bullied regularly for a year while I tried to "ignore it" until I finally snapped and bloodied the bully's nose. That led to a week of peace followed by the bully's friends holding me down while he taught me not to bother fighting back, followed by more of the usual. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
In the end, I think MMO companies will need to come up with creative, true-to-plot solutions to the problem, whether its as simple as a "murderer" flag, or tied to more complex socioeconomic penalties (say, shopkeepers charging you more and more the more bloodthirsty you become, until eventually the same players that you kill are making money off of you by reselling items to you at a hefty markup).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
"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.
i don't think it's spyware, i allow it to run on my system for ET, but i can tell you that your kids will be surrounded by better people online.
punkbuster keeps away all the lamers that use wallhacks, auto-headshots, and other forms of cheating.
the "matches" they participate in will be of higher quality and generally have less whiners or TKers.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I personally like the planetside method of PVP grief. Everytime you hurt a friendly you are punished with x amount of grief points. When your grief reaches a certain level the weapons in the game dont work, u cant buy vehicles, etc, etc, basically u can run around and act as a target for everyone else until your grief goes down. This is calculated as x points/hour of realtime. For me this is an effective technique. You want to run around and kill friendlies, then u pay the price. Simple answer is if they take away from another players fun, then take away theirs and let everyone know that they are in the badbooks at the moment.
a grapple, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, etc. etc. etc....
You just don't get the precision and quick response you need with a keyboard to effectively compete with a mouse user.
Depending on the tactics allowed and the map, you don't need a quick pitch response for any weapon. If you can anticipate where an opponent is going to be, you can set up your shot seconds before they get there. If the encounter areas are mostly 2D, you don't need to change your pitch. (Which is what the use of a mouse helps the most with.)
Grappling hooks forced every non-enclosed environment to become a 3D encounter area, hence requiring quick pitch control, hence requiring a mouse...
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These things help... some. The problem is that once you've done all this, you've essentially created a new and different game: "see how unpleasant I can make other people's lives without 'losing' in these various ways." The same set of people who are so antisocial in the first place will tend to find this new game more compelling than the one that the sane participants are interested in playing.
This new rash of for-money games actually have a somewhat easier time of it, as you get some fairly conclusive information about which characters are the same player. In the old world in which you had nothing more authoritative than source IP or email address, it was hard to enforce any kind of lasting punishment anyway.