Quake 3 is seeing somewhat of a revival in the NA scene right now (thanks to the GGL), but unfortunately it's overshadowed by an irritation that I think should plant a seed of doubt in the mind of any online competitior. Punkbuster, simply put, does not work. People are still cheating , and they are doing it easily and visibly on Punkbuster "enabled" servers.

If the GGL is going to succeed and be legitimate, it has to take the precedent here and simply abandon this outdated, buggy, and ultimately failed piece of software. I urge any game server hosting company to not enable punkbuster, because it has become a major irritation to scores of legitimate gamers, and a joke to those who simply cheat in it's presence with zero penalty. For tons of people Punkbuster means gameplay destroying lag, and waiting upward of 15 minutes for incredibly invasive hard drive scanning to stop, just so they can enjoy the game they play legitimately and have never cheated in. It means forced spectator mode and random kicking due to bugs in "updating" which has long since been meaningful. It means 2 minute bans at random for cvars out of spec (God forbid anyone use picmip 16) while known cheaters hog server bandwidth and happily chew people to pieces with bot rail and lg.

The only way the GGL is going to be legit is if they have gamers for referees, and ones with eyes trained to see the telltale signs of bot use (impossibly fast prediction rails through cracks, shaft that moves with perfect mechanical smoothness, etc) and while this will undoubtedly be hard to pull off, it's the only way you can ensure a fair stage for online competition. Now, I think it's safe to say we all have a general idea of who is going to perform well in the upcoming AmeriCup events for Quake 3, and they are more than likely not cheaters, which if you think about it, begs the question WHY have them and everyone else forced to put up with Punkbuster's bugginess and invasive drive scanning?

If the GGL or someone like speakeasy.net could force Punkbuster to modify their software to get rid of the useless drive scanning and cvar checks (as well as ban enforcement over stupid things, like IMMEDIATE updating) I would be the last one to complain about it. Keeping certain cvars in check, like snaps (which it doesn't do) or other questionable commands, most of which are enforceable by OSP anyway, is useful and necessary.. but until we see an improvement in both it's ability to stop cheaters, and a more invisible and reliable implementation to the end-user, I think it's time for server admins to turn it off.

And to anyone who would reply to this with damning statements about "learning to configure pb" they need to understand that punkbuster is NOT configurable, not in any meaningful way, and it's different for every person in how it acts when scanning. I've had numerous different hardware/os setups since pb came along, and some of them (about 50/50) have had no major problems, while others have ranged from minor nuisance to almost unplayable. Couple that with that fact that it doesn't actually WORK to stop cheaters, and you have to ask yourself why have it at all?