I remember installing this game two years ago and got these issues with PB. I don't remember what I did, but eventually I got it working. If I wasn't a prior AA2 player who wanted to know what the game had become then I probably would have just given up, but I persisted and here I am. I tried AA2 assist as well but only got it working once. Guess what, I couldn't fix the problem so I just moved on.
The point is that it's a really big problem if a lot of people simply can't get the game to work. Other than AA assist I can't think of a single game that had problems starting. If the problem can be fixed a lot of those negative reviews wouldn't be there, and I'd bet you'd get more eyes on the game if it was rated close to 90%. Being a free game is huge advantage. Being a free game and having a 90% rating is something almost no other game can boast.
If you want to grow the game it should be clear that fixing these technical issues should be the first step. You can't grow if you don't have new players coming in the pipeline because they can't start the game. Once they're in then it's a matter of giving them time and space to mature, which is where the community comes in. Eventually a few of them will even become comp players. Even then you have to keep the game compelling for people to stick around, and that could mean several things, maybe something as simple as achieving more skins (skin making competitions?), and also retaining existing players by keeping the gameplay familiar! This is important. You can't keep changing the game and expect people to put up with it. There's a big chunk of people who give up simply because the game has changed too much for them. This includes all the proposed changes for comp but also the changes from beta to final. Keep in mind that casual players are the pool you'd pick from and if the comp game is different from the regular game then that's just another barrier you've erected.
I'm not a CS:GO player but from watching videos it seems that the core of the game (mechanics/graphics/etc) hasn't really changed that much. What would players do if you removed jumping from CS:GO (sliding in AAPG)? The rules aren't really the problem as long as they are equally applied. Has anyone questioned why the knight in chess can jump over pieces? Nobody's claiming that's OP. That's just the rule and people have adapted their skills accordingly to it over time.
I hope people see that everything is connected. It starts with getting new players, nurturing them, and eventually getting some to play comp while at the same time keeping the larger community happy in the process.
If too dumb to figure out pb, then we don't want them anyway. Between Google and the forums, if issue not solved within an hour (I'm being generous here), then gaming is not for you.
If too dumb to figure out pb, then we don't want them anyway. Between Google and the forums, if issue not solved within an hour (I'm being generous here), then gaming is not for you.
It's not an issue of intelligence as much as it is one of convenience. If it's someone who doesn't know anything about the game and just wants to try it out, but they can't even get it to work out of the box, I can't blame them for being miffed.
Didn't they sort all that pre-install PB stuff? I'm sure that when you first go to launch the game after you download it.. it goes through pre-requistes like DirectX and .Net.. then whole PB setup process where you can see if it works or not.. or is that broken? maybe people are ignoring that part of the install process and just playing? then having the issue.
If my trollery drives you crazy, you'd better put on your seatbelt.
Vac authentication error is just a bug which u can fix, i think with restarting game or steam. It has nothing to do with vac as anticheat
Don't think it's that easy for what I remember, one of those italian guys tried both things, but he couldn't join the competitive after, but maybe something changed by then
LeXy^;33608"]applePIE, i think the only issue which would be solved by swapping to vac is th 'pb-kicks'. I'm really not sure, if more accounts would be banned or more cheats would get detected. Actonally ACI, PBBans and GCC do a pretty good job in relation of the number of players.
It seems a really big issue, that lots of cheats are simply modifications from other games which runs the UE. This means they are frequently updated and can not be detected by the checksum (what is in our game the most common approach).
what i would like to see (and i know its a lot of work) is a integrated anti-cheat system (or better stealthing the game), to make it as difficult as possible to developers of this [TOS Violation] programms. I am thinking, among others, the following:
- Check during the game by md5 hash, whether critical files were modified.
- Check, if *.dll's, eg. gets hooked / injected by other rprogramms.
- Check, if values in the ram are still the values which belongs here.
- Locally create and analyzing a screenshots for textures which do not come from the game.
- Check, if the speed of movement, fire-rates, mouse (especially the 'shaking' of aimbots) match the pretended of the game.
- Ini-parameter should be edited only by the in-game settings (And of cause in this case we would need more pareameter in the setting - especially performance related parameter.)
- and and and...
But this is only my dream - and if it ever comes true... who knows...
LeXy^
ps. I know were a bit out of the tipic - btw.: really good job flubby and than's for your work!
Very good points, but I believe the development of integrated cheat system is not really feasible for this game with so little numbers. But the Devs could pick up a A/C system that actually invests more resources into adjusting the system. And seeing PB with like 2 updates in lifetime of AAPG looks a bit weak to me.
Luckily we have also A/C organisations who invest time to catch some visual cheese outside of the pb system via pbss. Recently we had the discussion about streaming demorecs to ACI and the conclusion was that the game needs to send demorec hashes through punkbuster log system in order for ACI to accept them. If this could be done some blunt cheesers could also end up on master banlists
Wish it would be that easy with demorecs, but if they can't do nothing in videos with blatant aimbotters, like the one you posted on fb today or yesterday, don't know what would change with demos.
well they cant do anything about videos, because you can not authenticate a third party video for being unaltered. That is the main problem. Of course you would still need ppl to judge the demorec recordings.
LeXy^;33626"]applePIE, Punkbuster itselfe is not the thing which catches the cheater - especially not in our game. it is the basis to lo let eg. ACI LiveSecure do their job, capture the screenshots and creating logs / submitting player informations. therefor are not so many updates needed.
It is just a programm where u have the possibility to it him what to do - either run some md5 checks (for detecting ini changes or programms) or to get ACI or PBBans on board.
Simply running PB is no big help...
LeXy^
That is half correct lexy. Obviously PB is catching the cheese in game by providing pb kicks reported as pb violations. So with ACI or without ACI a person who has something that pb detects would be kicked out of the server. Livesecure simply streams the master ban list from ACI to the server and kicks the players who recieved a pb violation kick prior on another server regardless of the fact if he is still using cheese or not. If there were no live secure a player who stopped running cheese would not continue to get pb kicks on pb running servers.
Also Livesecure adds the players automatically to the master ACI banlist. Before livesecure you had to manually download banlists from ACI now we dont have to do this step.
But ACI livesecure does not tell PB to do a kick. It uses pb to check hashes of pb server logs and pbss.
cheers,
ApplePIE
EDIT: btw before there was any ACI PB was still doing its job by kicking cheese eaters out of protected servers
LeXy^;33626"]applePIE, Punkbuster itselfe is not the thing which catches the cheater - especially not in our game. it is the basis to lo let eg. ACI LiveSecure do their job, capture the screenshots and creating logs / submitting player informations. therefor are not so many updates needed.
It is just a programm where u have the possibility to it him what to do - either run some md5 checks (for detecting ini changes or programms) or to get ACI or PBBans on board.
Simply running PB is no big help...
LeXy^
Punkbuster catches cheaters but very rarely also it isnt updating lately. Thankfully we got ACI but it is suppose to be punkbusters job at stopping cheaters and ACI has always done a better job than they have.
Hopefully in the future or future AA series title we can have multiple anti-cheats. Like vac and pb combined.
LeXy^;33626"]applePIE, Punkbuster itselfe is not the thing which catches the cheater - especially not in our game. it is the basis to lo let eg. ACI LiveSecure do their job, capture the screenshots and creating logs / submitting player informations. therefor are not so many updates needed.
It is just a programm where u have the possibility to it him what to do - either run some md5 checks (for detecting ini changes or programms) or to get ACI or PBBans on board.
Simply running PB is no big help...
LeXy^
Punkbuster catches cheaters but very rarely also it isnt updating lately. Thankfully we got ACI but it is suppose to be punkbusters job at stopping cheaters and ACI has always done a better job than they have.
Hopefully in the future or future AA series title we can have multiple anti-cheats. Like vac and pb combined.
That and hopefully we can stream demorecs to ACI one day.
Game companies need to start developing games around creativity and fun again, not silly marketing statistics. Whenever companies develop games around marketing statistics, the game always ends up being bland and boring. But I suppose that's what happens when bean counters make design decisions. You're Welcome.
Didn't they sort all that pre-install PB stuff? I'm sure that when you first go to launch the game after you download it.. it goes through pre-requistes like DirectX and .Net.. then whole PB setup process where you can see if it works or not.. or is that broken? maybe people are ignoring that part of the install process and just playing? then having the issue.
It does install PB and all, even if you were to to uninstall AAPG right now and reinstall it, you'd get a prompt to install PB even if you already have it. What people get kicked by is that the service called punkbusterB isnt running by default, everytime I reinstall punkbuster I need to manually go into the taskmanager and get it started. I'd imagine this is the most common reason for people getting kicked by PB.
The kick usually is from punkbuster B and if people would take 10 min to search this thing called goggle, then they would learn that punkbuster needs to be set to run as admin if it wasn't for some reason already. The other reason is that they turned off a needed service in order to get an edge on other competitors i.e. Game booster or going into their control panel and turning off services. Hence I say too dumb or lazy.
Didn't they sort all that pre-install PB stuff? I'm sure that when you first go to launch the game after you download it.. it goes through pre-requistes like DirectX and .Net.. then whole PB setup process where you can see if it works or not.. or is that broken? maybe people are ignoring that part of the install process and just playing? then having the issue.
It does install PB and all, even if you were to to uninstall AAPG right now and reinstall it, you'd get a prompt to install PB even if you already have it. What people get kicked by is that the service called punkbusterB isnt running by default, everytime I reinstall punkbuster I need to manually go into the taskmanager and get it started. I'd imagine this is the most common reason for people getting kicked by PB.
If that's true it should be easy (?) for the dev team to check if the service is up and notifying the user with a message rather than kicking them, which basically looks like there's a problem with the game instead of PB.
And by message I don't mean some obscure line in the console that nobody looks at like 'kicked punk buster for 0 sec' or whatever it is. Needs to be nice and big so people will know what to do.
Didn't they sort all that pre-install PB stuff? I'm sure that when you first go to launch the game after you download it.. it goes through pre-requistes like DirectX and .Net.. then whole PB setup process where you can see if it works or not.. or is that broken? maybe people are ignoring that part of the install process and just playing? then having the issue.
It does install PB and all, even if you were to to uninstall AAPG right now and reinstall it, you'd get a prompt to install PB even if you already have it. What people get kicked by is that the service called punkbusterB isnt running by default, everytime I reinstall punkbuster I need to manually go into the taskmanager and get it started. I'd imagine this is the most common reason for people getting kicked by PB.
If that's true it should be easy (?) for the dev team to check if the service is up and notifying the user with a message rather than kicking them, which basically looks like there's a problem with the game instead of PB.
And by message I don't mean some obscure line in the console that nobody looks at like 'kicked punk buster for 0 sec' or whatever it is. Needs to be nice and big so people will know what to do.
Thing is it isn't a fault with the game, as we've already established it's PB kicking people, not the game. What other AC can you think of that you need to install seperate from the game and then have to make sure that it's actually running? Personally I can't think of one. With all the flaws of PB I don't see the value of keeping it around. Nobody even expects it do its job so they install other AC ontop of it. Wouldnt you call that a failed product?
I think pb is probably here to stay. What I had in mind was just to have a useful message box to say when it's not up. Similarly to some errors you see if you don't have directx installed when you try to launch a game for example. It's just more helpful compared to an obscure warning on the console.
I think pb is probably here to stay. What I had in mind was just to have a useful message box to say when it's not up. Similarly to some errors you see if you don't have directx installed when you try to launch a game for example. It's just more helpful compared to an obscure warning on the console.
Everytime I've been kicked by punkbuster it has told me with a window why, for example.
kicked, PunkbusterB not running.
Or something along those lines. The thing is, not everyone knows how to use google and even then, why should they be the ones making sure the AC is running, isnt that really up to the game?
" Nobody wants to keep re-learning how to play a game, especially if you've invested so many hours in playing a certain way"
That's what I thought when PG first came out back in closed beta. I thought, this doesn't deserve to have the AA name; I know what AA is, cause I played a lot of it, and what I'm doing isn't working. Note that that doesn't necessarily make it a bad game, I probably just suck at adapting. At this point, however, I don't really care how many changes are made. I would even throw in, say, sharks with laser beams. Whatever it takes to earn the AA name back (I was personally going for AA4, which is what a I call it anyway.) I'm a pretty critical individual, and that's just my opinion.
TBH, I uninstalled a while ago because I found CSGO, and I really love it. There are only a few few things AA4 has now that CS:GO doesn't, and it's not worth both for me even though one is free. One thing that really struck me was how Valve does a pretty good job of recognizing and then addressing mistakes quickly..... . . usually in... cough cough.... weapon handling and game mechanics. They still leave a lot to be desired sometimes, but I was very impressed to see them make a change, understand why it went wrong based off of comprehensive research and community feedback, and then fix it with an explanation to the community. This is my first time venturing onto the forums in a couple of months. I just hope we can get AA5 sometime soon or atleast something that will make the game worth it again. Keeping tabs, and when I see something, I'll be back. I don't have any sworn commitment to the AA name, and if I don't like it, I'm not going to play it until something different or better comes along.
Comments
The point is that it's a really big problem if a lot of people simply can't get the game to work. Other than AA assist I can't think of a single game that had problems starting. If the problem can be fixed a lot of those negative reviews wouldn't be there, and I'd bet you'd get more eyes on the game if it was rated close to 90%. Being a free game is huge advantage. Being a free game and having a 90% rating is something almost no other game can boast.
If you want to grow the game it should be clear that fixing these technical issues should be the first step. You can't grow if you don't have new players coming in the pipeline because they can't start the game. Once they're in then it's a matter of giving them time and space to mature, which is where the community comes in. Eventually a few of them will even become comp players. Even then you have to keep the game compelling for people to stick around, and that could mean several things, maybe something as simple as achieving more skins (skin making competitions?), and also retaining existing players by keeping the gameplay familiar! This is important. You can't keep changing the game and expect people to put up with it. There's a big chunk of people who give up simply because the game has changed too much for them. This includes all the proposed changes for comp but also the changes from beta to final. Keep in mind that casual players are the pool you'd pick from and if the comp game is different from the regular game then that's just another barrier you've erected.
I'm not a CS:GO player but from watching videos it seems that the core of the game (mechanics/graphics/etc) hasn't really changed that much. What would players do if you removed jumping from CS:GO (sliding in AAPG)? The rules aren't really the problem as long as they are equally applied. Has anyone questioned why the knight in chess can jump over pieces? Nobody's claiming that's OP. That's just the rule and people have adapted their skills accordingly to it over time.
I hope people see that everything is connected. It starts with getting new players, nurturing them, and eventually getting some to play comp while at the same time keeping the larger community happy in the process.
well they cant do anything about videos, because you can not authenticate a third party video for being unaltered. That is the main problem. Of course you would still need ppl to judge the demorec recordings.
That is half correct lexy. Obviously PB is catching the cheese in game by providing pb kicks reported as pb violations. So with ACI or without ACI a person who has something that pb detects would be kicked out of the server. Livesecure simply streams the master ban list from ACI to the server and kicks the players who recieved a pb violation kick prior on another server regardless of the fact if he is still using cheese or not. If there were no live secure a player who stopped running cheese would not continue to get pb kicks on pb running servers.
Also Livesecure adds the players automatically to the master ACI banlist. Before livesecure you had to manually download banlists from ACI now we dont have to do this step.
But ACI livesecure does not tell PB to do a kick. It uses pb to check hashes of pb server logs and pbss.
cheers,
ApplePIE
EDIT: btw before there was any ACI PB was still doing its job by kicking cheese eaters out of protected servers
Punkbuster catches cheaters but very rarely also it isnt updating lately. Thankfully we got ACI but it is suppose to be punkbusters job at stopping cheaters and ACI has always done a better job than they have.
Hopefully in the future or future AA series title we can have multiple anti-cheats. Like vac and pb combined.
That and hopefully we can stream demorecs to ACI one day.
_________________________
********Bam4D********BE ALL (THAT) YOU CAN BE!
________Army 1980_________
It does install PB and all, even if you were to to uninstall AAPG right now and reinstall it, you'd get a prompt to install PB even if you already have it. What people get kicked by is that the service called punkbusterB isnt running by default, everytime I reinstall punkbuster I need to manually go into the taskmanager and get it started. I'd imagine this is the most common reason for people getting kicked by PB.
If that's true it should be easy (?) for the dev team to check if the service is up and notifying the user with a message rather than kicking them, which basically looks like there's a problem with the game instead of PB.
And by message I don't mean some obscure line in the console that nobody looks at like 'kicked punk buster for 0 sec' or whatever it is. Needs to be nice and big so people will know what to do.
Thing is it isn't a fault with the game, as we've already established it's PB kicking people, not the game. What other AC can you think of that you need to install seperate from the game and then have to make sure that it's actually running? Personally I can't think of one. With all the flaws of PB I don't see the value of keeping it around. Nobody even expects it do its job so they install other AC ontop of it. Wouldnt you call that a failed product?
It's now banned after the
latest update.
Everytime I've been kicked by punkbuster it has told me with a window why, for example.
kicked, PunkbusterB not running.
Or something along those lines. The thing is, not everyone knows how to use google and even then, why should they be the ones making sure the AC is running, isnt that really up to the game?
That's what I thought when PG first came out back in closed beta. I thought, this doesn't deserve to have the AA name; I know what AA is, cause I played a lot of it, and what I'm doing isn't working. Note that that doesn't necessarily make it a bad game, I probably just suck at adapting. At this point, however, I don't really care how many changes are made. I would even throw in, say, sharks with laser beams. Whatever it takes to earn the AA name back (I was personally going for AA4, which is what a I call it anyway.) I'm a pretty critical individual, and that's just my opinion.
TBH, I uninstalled a while ago because I found CSGO, and I really love it. There are only a few few things AA4 has now that CS:GO doesn't, and it's not worth both for me even though one is free. One thing that really struck me was how Valve does a pretty good job of recognizing and then addressing mistakes quickly..... . . usually in... cough cough.... weapon handling and game mechanics. They still leave a lot to be desired sometimes, but I was very impressed to see them make a change, understand why it went wrong based off of comprehensive research and community feedback, and then fix it with an explanation to the community. This is my first time venturing onto the forums in a couple of months. I just hope we can get AA5 sometime soon or atleast something that will make the game worth it again. Keeping tabs, and when I see something, I'll be back. I don't have any sworn commitment to the AA name, and if I don't like it, I'm not going to play it until something different or better comes along.
_________________________
********Bam4D********BE ALL (THAT) YOU CAN BE!
________Army 1980_________