Looks like PunkBuster will finally kill Quake
With Id and Raven doing all they could to fuck up Quake 4, there's still a decent Quake 3 community out there playing. All the good quake players I know refuse to play Q4 and hold little hope out for QuakeWars (what with all the Halo and Call of Duty envy it has going on...If I wanted to play a goddamn WWII shooter or one with vehicles, I wouldn't be playing quake, morons.)
But I digress. This post is about the last game in the quake series that deserves the name Quake, and how another little company may have just sunk the death knell into it, too.
With a late point release, Quake 3 integrated support for PunkBuster - an anti-cheating extension that has basically been a minor annoyance for a few years. Until recently, there were two basic problems with PunkBuster:
- Doesn't really stop serious cheaters.
- Tries to add other 'value' besides anti-cheating.
Problem #1 is basically the "locks protect you from honest people" problem. Sure, some dude who decided to dabble with common aimbots, wallhacks or color shooters will be kept out, but the determined cheaters still get in and wreck the party. Now that's no big deal if there's no downside to having PB enabled. If they would just focus on #1 only, PunkBuster wouldn't suck so much.
Unfortunately, #2 means they also try to do stuff like serve as a nanny to block certain types of profanity - and they completely fuck this up by including literally tons of words. The best I can imagine is that the authors are not native English speakers. For instance, the sequence of characters "balls" is a no-no. Doesn't matter if it's in "Get the basketballs" or "I like the movie Spaceballs" - if your player name has "balls" in it, you get kicked. I know it's possible to say something 'dirty' with the word "balls" but that's just the point - you can 'say something dirty' with lots of innocuous words. For example the name "Pound my Bloody Hole" is perfectly legal. One player even protested PB's nanny mode by using color coding in the name "HOTEL CORAL ESSEX" (for literally years). Unless they want to block two-thirds of the dictionary, this feature is just broken. If they are going to play nanny (and they shouldn't, but if they are), they should stick to roughly the words the FCC regulates for TV in the U.S. A clear, simple, minimalist approach.
The PunkBuster answer to this whole nanny issue is a cop out, too. "Your server admin can change the settings." That doesn't address the defaults that ship with PunkBuster. It also doesn't address that there are literally thousands of quake servers out there. Not all admins can even be contacted.
It gets worse - when PunkBuster doesn't like something it kicks you off the server, in many cases without any warning. Did I lose net connectivity? Is there bug? The only place you can find a message that tells you why is if you enable logging (not something the innocent/casual gamer will know to do).
So basically this thing messes up the gaming experience and doesn't stop the cheaters. A net negative, and totally retarded that we users have to put up with it, but it adds up to just a manageable annoyance in the end. Or does it...?
Enter the latest PunkBuster update
The good folks at Microsoft have added a bunch of security in Windows Vista. Now for PunkBuster to get around this (to continue failing to catch cheaters but trying to find hacks), its architecture had to change. Starting with the latest update, PB now installs system services and kernel drivers. They do this even on Windows XP where they don't need to.
In general, when you are an application programmer and you think "now I need a kernel driver" you are wrong. And even if you are right, you are not qualified. Use extreme caution so you don't start causing perf problems or instability on people's machined.
And sure enough, starting with the latest PunkBuster update, a machine that performed fine with quake3 for years has become unplayable in many circumstances. Additionally, the machine is now unstable - with several hard hangs a day.
So at this point unless I find an option, the geniuses at EvenBalance will have finally killed the best first person shooter of all time.
Please Id, next time you look to integrate anti-cheating software from an outside vendor, include some contract stipulations like that they will only change the gameplay in order to stop cheating and they won't integrate buggy kernel drivers that hard-hang your machine. Additionally, you should consider specifically punishing EvenBalance for ruining Q3 - the only thing that was keeping a user community alive for the quake series.
