2006-06-21: Busting inaccuracies and myths about PunkBuster
Busting inaccuracies and myths about PunkBuster
Jun 21 2006 1:02PM
This was originally posted to Development at uo.com. [1]
Another day, another round of questions and concerns about the new hot topic in Britannia. Here are some facts that I hope alleviate more of your concerns and answer more of your questions...
PunkBuster can’t read English, decipher a tax return, or tell a financial document from a picture of your dog. It looks at blocks of data and compares them to blocks of data known to be in cheat programs. That’s it.
It doesn’t transmit any user data to any server. It merely sends a message that says: "This person has something we suspect to be a cheat program running. This is what program we think it is." When this happens in UO, in most cases it will keep you from playing until you turn the cheat program off. In some cases, it could flag a GM and a GM will investigate what’s going on with the player.
If you are concerned about the language in the PunkBuster license, you should read over the terms of service and licenses for any other MMORPG you play, as many of them have extremely similar language. You should also review what virus protection and spyware prevention programs do. Both of those work a lot like PunkBuster.
As I’ve said... We will be entering public beta in mid-July and will test for a month or more. If performance issues arise, we will either solve them or not use PunkBuster. I do know that ICQ, voice chat programs, UOAssist, UO AutoMap, internet browsers and various other programs UO players use while playing take up far more CPU cycles and bandwidth than Punk Buster.
UO Assist and UO AutoMap will not be flagged as cheat programs, nor will any program on the approved-for-use list. In fact, many programs that are basically harmless won’t be flagged. We are looking for programs that automate processes that shouldn’t be automated and programs that make your character faster, stronger or better than anyone else’s.
We do definitely need to improve UO’s macro system to take some of the unneeded drudgery and repetition out of certain tasks. That is something we are planning for a future update.
And yes, PunkBuster has been on my personal home PC for years. I’ve played 90 percent of the games PunkBuster supports and not once has PunkBuster gotten in my way. In fact, I simply won’t play on an open server. It’s just not fun to lose to cheaters.
As for what shard will be PunkBuster free, here are the options on the drawing board:
- Test Center. (TC would still be occasionally wiped and would still get various rule sets depending on what we are testing.)
- Siege and Mugen, and scripting would still be illegal and enforced by GMs. (Some rule modifications might have to be made to Siege if we did this, like restrict the use of bags of sending.)
- Launch a completely new shard, where scripting would be legal. (This shard would be one you could transfer to for free, but never leave. We have been calling it Devil’s Island.)
The decision depends on how much demand there is for a non-PB server and what player feedback we get.
As an occasional Siege player, I kind of relish being able to hunt scripters for fun, but then again, if a large amount of non-PB players want to play with the regular rule-set, a new shard would make the most sense. I want to see what the beta test reveals before making that decision.
See you Sosaria,
Darkscribe
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