• RustedRoot
    User
    Member since December 29, 2017

    Has anyone heard of any players getting this ban lifted yet?

  • RustedRoot
    Retired Staff
    Member since May 05, 2017

    Nope and an EB representative made a post on the Battlefield forums and stated that these codes comprised a series of violations that had been silently recorded. He did not go any deeper than that. The shortest time EB has turned around and said "oops we fucked up" was close to a year, so we might not see any bans getting lifted for another 9-12 months.

  • RustedRoot
    User
    Member since August 31, 2017


    "

    Nope and an EB representative made a post on the Battlefield forums and stated that these codes comprised a series of violations that had been silently recorded. He did not go any deeper than that. The shortest time EB has turned around and said "oops we fucked up" was close to a year, so we might not see any bans getting lifted for another 9-12 months.

    Angry_Cuban13
    Hi, can I have a link to that post? It sounds like there are no false positives and the people who were caught by this new detection should remain banned and not get a free pass.


  • RustedRoot
    Retired Staff
    Member since May 05, 2017

    Nobody is getting a free pass. We conduct thorough investigations in any player with the above-mentioned violations and if we do not find evidence of cheating, they remain unbanned.

  • RustedRoot
    Administrator
    Member since May 08, 2017

    Furthermore serverowners are always free to stream to other AC's next to our plugin. GGC and PBBans will continue to enforce the bans issued for these violations. We will use those 3 specific violations as supporting evidence when the statistics indicate cheating as well.

    More info here: https://bf4db.com/forum/thread/punkbuster-violation-bans-1595

  • RustedRoot
    User
    Member since August 31, 2017


    "

    Nobody is getting a free pass. We conduct thorough investigations in any player with the above-mentioned violations and if we do not find evidence of cheating, they remain unbanned.

    Angry_Cuban13

    Can I have the link of the said EB post, please?

    My bad, I'm a little confused, as you said "it's a series of violations that had been silently recorded", that sounds really bad, not like some "false-positive" some of these violation even say "VIOLATION (AIMBOT) 52120", so BF4DB will conduct thorough investigations just in the said violations? Even though you guys have no data from EB and the time of the said violation, why those violation are any different from the others? I'm just trying to understand, so PB violations at some point were good enough for a ban and now it's not good enough anymore?

    What I got from Sovereign reply on battlefield forums(Is that from the same thread that EB replyed?) is that players that don't have a stats like a "cheater stats" and many hours of game time, but were caught by the new detection, if DF4DB Staff think their stats looks like a legit stats, then those players fall under the "false-positive area" and the others get a ban or remain banned, even though both were caught by the same PB violation, how BF4DB would tell the difference, by the time those players were caught, they probably removed everything.

    Let's say a cheater that does his best to hide the fact that he is a cheater and he is cheating for 3000 hours of game time, EB rolls up a code update or it's silently recording the violations, then it detects his cheats and it's one of those violations, get a PB Ban, get reported, then BF4DB would review his case and because he has many hours, his stats looks like "legit", then he would come out as "clean" because he looks "legit" and people say the said player is "legit", then that player would get a "free pass", even though that was not the main intention of BF4DB Staff, from what I have seen that there are ZERO tolerance with linked and stolen accounts, how the "new" PB violation is any better, I mean, if EB come forward and say: Yup, most of them are false-positives or some of them are false-positive. Then I can understand a review or if they review any of those players and say that it was a false-positive, then that would be ok and a false-positive can happen, but so far this is not the case, the "EB representative" did not come and say that "it was a series of false-positives violations", instead we got "it's a series of violations that had been silently recorded", I could be wrong, but the whole thing sounds terrible.


  • RustedRoot
    Administrator
    Member since May 08, 2017

    sExXvtO.jpg

    From: https://forums.battlefield.com/en-us/discussion/138109/you-were-kicked-by-punkbuster/p8


    Difference with those violations is the amount of very high playtime accounts receiving bans. Also some people having these violations do not seem to be able to identify a cause, as we see that they have dozens of the same kicks logged. This usually does not happen, players not being able to play anymore at all because of a violation. Violation kicks should stop after the cause is removed.

    Many people creating a ticket at EB have their violation kick changed to a PB global instantly. Which is very odd as normally cheats can have incredible amounts of violations without ever receiving a global. So the amount of kicks does not seem to contribute to a global ban. Why the people that appeal suddenly do receive a global ban?

    The current situation looks very much like what happened back in 2015. Oddly enough back in 2015 another PB staffmember replied to a similar thread with a very similar explanation.. One year later it turned out he was wrong..

    Again, we do not say that all bans based on those violations are false positives. But some cases we think are very unlikely to have cheated and thus we will be extra carefull with those violation codes. We have always encouraged serverowners to run multiple AC plugins. If you run GGC or PBBans next to our service there won't change much.

    All players that appeal for this violation will be checked for odd statistics. If nothing is found we will lift the ban. New cases that we log with the said violations will also be checked and only banned if the stats also indicate cheating. If nothing is found they can ofcourse be reported as usual with other forms of evidence.

  • RustedRoot
    User
    Member since August 31, 2017


    "

    sExXvtO.jpg

    From: https://forums.battlefield.com/en-us/discussion/138109/you-were-kicked-by-punkbuster/p8


    Difference with those violations is the amount of very high playtime accounts receiving bans. Also some people having these violations do not seem to be able to identify a cause, as we see that they have dozens of the same kicks logged. This usually does not happen, players not being able to play anymore at all because of a violation. Violation kicks should stop after the cause is removed.

    Many people creating a ticket at EB have their violation kick changed to a PB global instantly. Which is very odd as normally cheats can have incredible amounts of violations without ever receiving a global. So the amount of kicks does not seem to contribute to a global ban. Why the people that appeal suddenly do receive a global ban?

    The current situation looks very much like what happened back in 2015. Oddly enough back in 2015 another PB staffmember replied to a similar thread with a very similar explanation.. One year later it turned out he was wrong..

    Again, we do not say that all bans based on those violations are false positives. But some cases we think are very unlikely to have cheated and thus we will be extra carefull with those violation codes. We have always encouraged serverowners to run multiple AC plugins. If you run GGC or PBBans next to our service there won't change much.

    All players that appeal for this violation will be checked for odd statistics. If nothing is found we will lift the ban. New cases that we log with the said violations will also be checked and only banned if the stats also indicate cheating. If nothing is found they can ofcourse be reported as usual with other forms of evidence.

    Scavenger

    Thanks for the link, but reading it now, for me it make even less sense why would BF4DB would take the word of those who are banned, but not take the word from punkbuster, it's so clear:

    "This violation includes a plethora of violations, covering public, private and DIY cheats."

    "I can say that anyone who has received the 88001 violation were logged in many different silent detection methods. This was done to cause maximum confusion within the private paid cheat sites."

    Date:  March 27, 2018 11:08AM

    Since then not a single ban was lifted, a year from now, if there is no news about those ban on evenbalance site, don't you think that would look bad to BF4DB? But who care? another year and BF4 could be super dead, I'm just a little bit sad seeing things going to this direction, I'm not posting because "I want to see player A or B banned", not at all, I want cheaters to be banned, doesn't matter who is it, I only played a few time with 2 players that were caught by this, but at the time I played against them, I didn't think they were cheating, but that doesn't make them clean, I guess...


  • RustedRoot
    Administrator
    Member since May 08, 2017


    "


    "

    sExXvtO.jpg

    From: https://forums.battlefield.com/en-us/discussion/138109/you-were-kicked-by-punkbuster/p8


    Difference with those violations is the amount of very high playtime accounts receiving bans. Also some people having these violations do not seem to be able to identify a cause, as we see that they have dozens of the same kicks logged. This usually does not happen, players not being able to play anymore at all because of a violation. Violation kicks should stop after the cause is removed.

    Many people creating a ticket at EB have their violation kick changed to a PB global instantly. Which is very odd as normally cheats can have incredible amounts of violations without ever receiving a global. So the amount of kicks does not seem to contribute to a global ban. Why the people that appeal suddenly do receive a global ban?

    The current situation looks very much like what happened back in 2015. Oddly enough back in 2015 another PB staffmember replied to a similar thread with a very similar explanation.. One year later it turned out he was wrong..

    Again, we do not say that all bans based on those violations are false positives. But some cases we think are very unlikely to have cheated and thus we will be extra carefull with those violation codes. We have always encouraged serverowners to run multiple AC plugins. If you run GGC or PBBans next to our service there won't change much.

    All players that appeal for this violation will be checked for odd statistics. If nothing is found we will lift the ban. New cases that we log with the said violations will also be checked and only banned if the stats also indicate cheating. If nothing is found they can ofcourse be reported as usual with other forms of evidence.

    Scavenger

    Thanks for the link, but reading it now, for me it make even less sense why would BF4DB would take the word of those who are banned, but not take the word from punkbuster, it's so clear:

    "This violation includes a plethora of violations, covering public, private and DIY cheats."

    "I can say that anyone who has received the 88001 violation were logged in many different silent detection methods. This was done to cause maximum confusion within the private paid cheat sites."

    Date:  March 27, 2018 11:08AM

    Since then not a single ban was lifted, a year from now, if there is no news about those ban on evenbalance site, don't you think that would look bad to BF4DB? But who care? another year and BF4 could be super dead, I'm just a little bit sad seeing things going to this direction, I'm not posting because "I want to see player A or B banned", not at all, I want cheaters to be banned, doesn't matter who is it, I only played a few time with 2 players that were caught by this, but at the time I played against them, I didn't think they were cheating, but that doesn't make them clean, I guess...


    Russao
    As I said earlier, we do not fully depend on PB violations. In fact most of our bans are stats based. GGC and PBBans will still enforce all the violations without asking any questions. 

    If after one year, EB did not confirm any false positives yet we will see what we do then. But as we have had a couple of seemingly random PB global bans pop up on users that suddenly dissapeared after months without any explanation, it's safe to say that no AC is 100%. Neither is FF which banned me and some other users because of an exploit. What sets us apart from other AC's is that we try to keep the human brain in control rather then a machine. 


    In the meantime some community members came with the idea of keeping the PB bans as a seperate list from our own so users can choose to enforce violation kicks or not. I personally think this would be very nice. How I imagine it is that we will just handle all violations like GGC and PBBans and the server owner can chose if he wants to enforce bans based on specific violations. But that is just an idea now. I can not tell if this is going to be implemented somewhere in the future as the devs are very busy with a lot of other things too. 

  • RustedRoot
    Retired Staff
    Member since May 05, 2017

    I’d like to add a note on here. We’ve been doing some internal testing as well. The results have been puzzling. 

    Punkbuster issues kicks (violations) when it detects something abnormal. So if you remove the offending cheat then hypothetically it won’t issue another violation as it will no longer detect an issue. 

    Piggybacking off of that, if you have a completely different computer, with a clean OS install and game install, you shouldn’t get kicked for said violation as nothing is going to trigger it. However, in our ongoing testing thanks to some willing participants, we’ve found that even in a new clean environment it’s still issuing a violation, which doesn’t make sense. To make matters more confusing, on the other computer it came back as something completely different. Then, back on the original computer, it threw the origina Violation once again.

    I am the last person who will ever take the side of a hacker, and I have no agenda nor do I benefit from doing so. We are simply trying to figure out WHY this is happening. If we find out that they are all valid, then the bans will be re-issued. All accounts that are being unbanned and/or passed over for banning in the first place are marked with an internal tag so if we need to re-ban, we can easily get to them. 

    We have more testing to do, and will release more info when we have it.

  • RustedRoot
    User
    Member since June 17, 2018

    I'd like to contribute to this thread in some manner by offering my personal perspective. 

    I've played bf4 since release, 3400 hours, made very close friends, both try-harded and trolled. I didn't know it at the time, but I was banned along with many others. I thought simply it was another punkbuster issue, so I went through the whole process of fixing PB that had worked in the past - reinstalling, checking my firewall, googling and trying everything I could come across. I eventually launched BF4 through battlelog to see what the error code was. 52120 aimbot. I know I have nothing to present other than a plea to get someone who matters to listen, so im posting here. I maintain that I never hacked, and have been removed from a game I enjoyed for 5 years. Not sure what I can do other than proclaim my innocence to add to the voices trying to call attention to this.

    http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf4/user/staleturd/

    https://bf4stats.com/pc/staleturd 

    https://www.247fairplay.com/CheatDetector/staleturd#toc-current-bf4-battlelog-stats







  • RustedRoot
    User
    Member since August 31, 2017


    "

    I’d like to add a note on here. We’ve been doing some internal testing as well. The results have been puzzling. 

    Punkbuster issues kicks (violations) when it detects something abnormal. So if you remove the offending cheat then hypothetically it won’t issue another violation as it will no longer detect an issue. 

    Piggybacking off of that, if you have a completely different computer, with a clean OS install and game install, you shouldn’t get kicked for said violation as nothing is going to trigger it. However, in our ongoing testing thanks to some willing participants, we’ve found that even in a new clean environment it’s still issuing a violation, which doesn’t make sense. To make matters more confusing, on the other computer it came back as something completely different. Then, back on the original computer, it threw the origina Violation once again.

    I am the last person who will ever take the side of a hacker, and I have no agenda nor do I benefit from doing so. We are simply trying to figure out WHY this is happening. If we find out that they are all valid, then the bans will be re-issued. All accounts that are being unbanned and/or passed over for banning in the first place are marked with an internal tag so if we need to re-ban, we can easily get to them. 

    We have more testing to do, and will release more info when we have it.

    Sovereign_Skies

    How about contacting EB? The same day I replied to this  thread, I sent EB an email, linking them to this site and asking them if they could elaborate more about those PB codes and if any of those violation could be a bug or false-positive.

    Today I got an answer from Adam Dunahoe, dunno if it can help, this is his reply:
    [quote]
    Re: PB codes 86001, 88001, and 52120 Hello Russao, There are no indications that there is a problem with these violations. We do not find these violations to be triggered in error. We will of course investigate any information regarding a potential false detection. I have not seen any contact from bf4db.com to our research. I also, don't see anything provided in the forum post. If they have concerns, or suspicions, we are more than welcome to hear them out and investigate. Thanks, -Adam
    [/quote]

    https://imgur.com/XZrciFm

    XZrciFm.png

  • RustedRoot
    Retired Staff
    Member since May 05, 2017

    Nice stock response!

  • RustedRoot
    Administrator
    Member since May 08, 2017

    Have had similar responses. Unfortunately, but maybe understandable, they never go into detail about the cause. So we can't do much with such responses.

    Only thing we conclude is that these violations are behaving very different from the other ones but very similar to previous false positives.

    We are still puzzled about the cause. Most people are now receiving global bans after they appeal... Another thing what causes trust issues is that very little is known about how to correctly appeal a ban at EB and what they actually take as "evidence" for a false positive. They are never open on what they need in order to do their investigation. 

    What I do like to know from people affected: did you have 2FA enabled on Origin?

  • RustedRoot
    User
    Member since June 17, 2018

    Any update?