technology, networking and IP telephony
PersonalComputing
Battlefield 3 – PunkBuster breaks!@#$%
0January 25, 2012
I’ve been a big Battlefield fan ever since Battlefield 1942 and the mod Desert Combat. I really enjoyed Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142, so I was expecting a lot from Battlefield 3 when it was released late last year. While the graphics and basic game play are truly amazing the team work aspects of the game seem very much an after thought which is very disappointing. In the initial release of the game you couldn’t manually select which squad you wanted to join, a feature that’s been in every Battlefield game since the beginning of time. And where was the in-game voice communications? A feature that revolutionized PC gaming was gone and replaced again by a solution that seem to be an after thought, ESN Sonar. With all those issues the game has still been a lot of fun, however, recently it seems that hacks and cheats are becoming spoiling the fun.
Which leads me to the current issue facing Battlefield 3 players. PunkBuster appears to be broken and is preventing a large number of Battlefield 3 players from enjoying the game. Players are getting kicked from server almost immediately after joining. Here’s an example of the log message you’ll find on the server side;
PunkBuster Server: RESTRICTION: player1 (slot #2) [1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) 75.111.11.111:3659] Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab PunkBuster Server: RESTRICTION: player1 (slot #2) [1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) 75.111.11.111:3659] Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab PunkBuster Server: Kick Command Issued (RESTRICTION: Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab) for (slot#2) 75.111.11.111:3659 1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx player1 PunkBuster Server: Lost Connection (slot #2) 75.111.11.111:3659 1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) player1
It didn’t take too long until I stumbled across a Battlelog post from EA/Dice that acknowledged there was an issue with PunkBuster. There was an article on PC Gamer that alluded to some issues around hackers potentially injecting unauthorized bans into the ban lists that are streamed from PBBans and GGC.
Several Game Service Providers (GSP) posted the following note on their sites;
We are hearing reports that GGC / PBBans are being exploited and many players are being incorrectly banned by an exploit in the streaming process. We suggest customers disable using the GGC / PBBans banlists until this is resolved.
There was also a recent blog post from EA/Dice where they claimed they were going to start clamping down on the rampant hacks and cheats that are pervasive throughout the multiplayer servers. It looks like they might have broken something when they started clamping down, let’s hope there’s a fix soon.
You can try updating your installation of PunkBuster but this time around it appears that the problem is somewhere in the cloud. Sorry!
What game(s) do you play if any?
Cheers!
Updated: Friday January 27, 2012 – apparently the PunkBuster problems have been resolved.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2012
2December 24, 2011
I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Cheers!
State of the Blog 2011
4October 13, 2011
It’s that time of year again… where I review the overall success and cost of running this blog (and forums) and I post some general thoughts about the past year and try to solicit new ideas for the future. I’m totally amazed when I think that it’s been 4 years now since I started blogging back in October 2007 on Blogger. Technology has come a long way in those 4 years as have I both professionally and personally.
Content
While I haven’t been winning any awards for my journalist talent it has been rewarding to hear the feedback from all the wonderful people that I’ve met either on my blog or in the discussion forums. I’m hoping to round up some guest bloggers in the future and try broadening the topics I generally cover. If you’ve got a knack for technical writing and you’d like to see your name in lights please drop me a line.
Forums
The forums have been a pretty big success in my opinion although there’s still a lot more I’d like to see us achieve. I’ve had a lot of help which I need to acknowledge here from Flintstone, Dominik, Paul and Artur. Without these guys the forums wouldn’t be half the place they are today. Thanks guys!
The forums have grown tremendously over the past year, we’ve seen a 359% increase in overall traffic with some 51,116 unique visitors to the forums generating some 81,766 visits and 239,651 pageviews in total. We have a total of 681 registered users with 421 users have made at least one post or more. Over the past year we’ve had visitors from 125 different countries.
Finances
The financials are pretty straight forward. In calendar year 2010 I paid out around $378.42 to GoDaddy, and RIMU for domain names, hosting, etc. I collected around $367.41 in advertising revenue which came from Google Adsense and a few direct advertising sales. So while we were in the red again this year I was only down $11.01 which made my wife quite happy.
Let me say “Thank you” to the sponsors and all those that take the time and effort to follow my blog.
Blog Traffic
There’s been a slow but stead increase in blog traffic over the past 12 months. Looking at some of the Google Analytics data I can see that there has been approximately a 94% increase in visits (23,633), unique visitors (17,944) and pageviews (44,489) comparing the June-July 2011 timeframe to the same timeframe in 2010. Over the past year there were some 159,872 unique visitors to the blog generating some 232,498 visits and 440,725 pageviews in total.
The traffic increase has been steady enough that I’ve had to investigate CDN solutions and deploy caching plug-ins such as W3TC in an effort to keep up with all the traffic. In January we received a free upgrade from RIMU that we applied to the VPS and increased our memory from 480MB to 740MB. With the upgrade we were able to increase the number of web clients we can support concurrently. We were also able to install APC to help with PHP caching and increase the amount of caching within MySQL all in an effort to boost the servers overall performance and decrease the time which it takes to serve up the content to you the user.
Future
I’m not sure what the future holds. The global economy has been all over the place this past year and the uncertainty ways on everyone as people try to “do more with less”. You’ll probably find me here again next year blogging away. Perhaps I’ll make good on my last years claim to start making some screencasts.
What would you like to see?
Cheers!
