Starting out as a third part mod for the original Half-Life, the Punkbuster anti-cheating service from the company Even Balance has slowly grown into one of the most well know anti-cheating efforts for PC games, including Battlefield 2, Doom 3, F.E.A.R, and the upcoming Battlefield 2142 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. FiringSquad got a chance to chat with Even Balance founder Tony Ray to find out more about their current and future plans for Punkbuster and their views on the current state of cheating in games.

FiringSquad: First, Even Balance continues to gain new publishers and games for your anti-cheat program PunkBuster. About how many games is PunkBuster being used for?

Tony Ray: The complete list of currently live titles is always displayed on our splash page at www.evenbalance.com. Right now, we are supporting about twenty titles.

FiringSquad: Why do you think your program continues to gain customers, especially since there could be efforts made by the developers themselves to create their own anti-cheating program?

Tony Ray: Well we don't advertise or market directly to game developers/publishers in any way. All of our business comes from word of mouth between top tier developers and publishers. So we make every effort to provide the best possible third party outsourced anti-cheat resource available to game developers and publishers. And word gets around. Our pricing is reasonable and we are constantly improving our product based on new advancements by cheat authors. Plus, since we are totally independent, there is never any conflict of interest in doing business with us. It is a win/win situation for a game developer/publisher that wants to prove to their multiplayer customers that they care about the cheating issue. Allocating game programmers to build an in-house anti-cheat solution just doesn't make sense from a cost nor public relations standpoint. Merely adding PunkBuster to a game opens the game up to an ever growing segment of online players who just won't buy a multiplayer game without a proven anti-cheat system.

FiringSquad: What are the current most popular cheats and hacks that you have seen crop up in games and how do you combat it?

Tony Ray: Cheats that give the cheater information about enemy players that non-cheating players normally do not have continue to be the most popular type of cheat. This includes wallhacks, tag hacks, so-called chams, etc. Always knowing where enemies are or having enemies highlighted to always stand out against any background is a huge advantage that warps the gameplay greatly to the cheaters advantage. Most of these cheats hack the operating system to insert cheat code via dll injection or by detouring low level Windows API calls. We have continued to improve PB over the past months to be able to detect new insertion methods as they surface. And our new code detects the actual methods used by advanced hacks so that we can catch private hacks as well as public hacks. We do still catch a surprising number of new cheats using very old detection methods, but our newer advanced methods are handy when the old methods are avoided by the more skilled hack authors.

FiringSquad: How much communication is there between Even Balance and the developers and publishers in trying to locate cheats and hackers?

Tony Ray: The lines of communication are always open from our standpoint. Some of our clients talk to us very frequently, sometimes multiple times per day. Others we hear from less often. We spend zero time trying to locate hackers themselves. Our efforts do not include trying to shut down websites, etc. Our researchers spend the vast majority of their time locating cheats and developing methods to detect those cheats and getting the methods pushed out to PunkBuster servers. Many of our clients forward to us cheats that they are aware of but we usually are already detecting them by the time our clients pass them along.

FiringSquad: As more and more players get access to faster broadband connections, will it become more difficult to take out hackers and cheaters in online games?

Tony Ray: Since we target only top tier titles, most players in those games have had broadband connections for years. Sub-broadband players rarely try to play the games we are supporting because the gameplay is just too choppy in most cases. Plus the only real advantage a broadband user has with regard to cheats is that the cheat downloads take less time (which isn't much of an advantage). There is no hindrance to PunkBuster associated with a punk who tries to cheat using a broadband connection versus a punk with a modem.

FiringSquad: Recently Even Balance announced a deal to provide PunkBuster support for Ultima Online. How different is it to develop the program to work on an MMORPG title?

Tony Ray: Almost all the differences involve reducing PunkBuster's bandwidth usage between the server and game client. For example, in non MMOGs, PunkBuster updates are streamed to servers from our masters and then the server streams in the background to each connected out-of-date client during gameplay. For MMOGs, PunkBuster clients pull new updates directly from our masters to avoid over-burdening the game server with trying to update hundreds or thousands of players at the same time. Other than that, the technical details associated with detecting cheats is exactly the same for MMOGs.

FiringSquad: Will PunkBuster continue its support of Ultima Online with the upcoming revamp of the game and if so what new features can you talk about?

Tony Ray: Our contracts are month to month. So it is going to be up to the client to decide whether or not to continue PunkBuster support for games that have extended life cycles.

FiringSquad: What other games can you talk about will have future PunkBuster support?

Tony Ray: Unfortunately, none. We do not discuss support for games prior to public announcements being made. All I can say is that we have other top tier games lined up that have not yet been announced.

FiringSquad: What other projects besides PunkBuster is Even Balance working on?

Tony Ray: All of our energy and resources are tied to one product: PunkBuster Anti-Cheat. We have small side projects that are optional add-ons for PunkBuster that are updated as necessary (such as PBSETUP and PBUCON), but none of those are stand alone products.

FiringSquad: Finally is there anything else you wish to say about PunkBuster and Even Balance?

Tony Ray: We are starting to see more and more inquiries regarding cheat sites that sell private commercial cheats. I just want to say that honest players should not believe what is posted on these sites. There are a couple of notorious sites that make a lot of noise and falsely claim on their website that their hacks are undetected or PB-proof or whatever. In these cases, we are catching virtually every commercial and public hack they release within hours and are banning the GUIDS/CDKEYS associated with the detections. Think about it, cheating and lying go hand in hand. If a punk hack author admitted openly that PunkBuster was catching his customers and banning their accounts, how many cheats would he sell? We have actually seen several cases where an honest player pays for a cheat so he can send it to us and then logs into the private forums only to find out about all the angry "customers" who either have no working cheats as promised or who are getting banned over and over due to our detections of the supposedly-undetected hacks for which they paid. These sites also love to post screenshots or movies of how they are cheating on PunkBuster enabled servers - but what you have to consider is that someone who is smart enough to write an advanced game hack is also smart enough to create a fake screenshot/movie demonstrating something that doesn't exist in the real world as it is being portrayed.

Blog + Share: Digg • Del.icio.us • Reddit • SU • furl • More: