I have a lot of experience with PunkBuster, and I can tell you that you will be just as dissapointed. I mean no disrespect to the fine people at PunkBuster, they have a hard job, and they have had some success too.
They do not update it very often, and the cheat makers update their cheats much more quickly. Also, it seems that at least with the battlefield 1942 engine there is a whole class of cheats that PB just cannot intercept and you have to rely on limited screenshot requests to see people using radar hacks and other types of cheats. If you think that steam has issues updating... PB has worse problems, and regularly (if not configured just right) kicks people from game who are not cheaters simply because they have an incompatible router and faulty design of the network communication code for downloading PB updates and authenticating with the PB servers.
I agree that Valve is currently behind on the anti-cheating front, but I am willing to give them a chance because I think that they have the potential to do a better job with a combination of cheat detection and regular game updates that rescramble the binaries and memory footprints. I think security built in from the vendor has a better chance of working better.
In fact, the last update stopped an existing wallhack, at least according to a hacker on my server... In game he was complaining that his wallhacks no longer worked. Guess he didn't know I was an admin.... BAN.
Tig wrote:
Hi,
New to the list and I have no idea who Richard Welsh is, however I don't see '@valvesoftware.com' in the email address, so I don't believe Richard speak about what valve is working on.
What I can tell you is this, cheaters suck and I now have 4 in-game admins on my 'single' CS:S server. They spend a fair amount of their time dealing with cheaters and exploits.
The last thing I really want to do is place my trust in some thrid-party Anti-Cheat BETA software that comes without source code, on my server. Who knows what backdoor could be in that software, or memory leak, or CPU usage hog, or any number of things that take time to work out why my server is now running crap.
I was seriously thinking about stopping the server because of the lack of exploit checking that CS:S does, and replacing it with another PunkBuster supported game. The only thing that stopped me from doing this was the demand from the players (the servers is almost always full).
I hope that VAC2 is going to be something wonderful and not something like the Windows Security Publicity Stunt / Joke - lots of hype and very little else.
If valve does not have the time to release something very soon (like today :]), they should contact EvenBalance, at least they care about stopping game exploits - hell, thats ALL they do.
-Tig
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