Pure Gaming

GGC is a streaming service for game servers. They have been the target of fake bans the last few days. I see many BF3 servers use their streaming service. I am with PBBANS way back when RTCW came out in 2001. Back then getting streaming wasn’t so hard as it is now. PBBANS has been a victim of fake bans back in 2008. A decision was made then to have a lot more background checks on admins who wanted to stream from them. PBBANS was the only one that made very strict background checks to find out your not a hacker trying to ruin a legit players day (maybe even their entire week). Other streaming services just did not pay any attention to it and went on like usual.

This is the case now with GGC. They are now a victim of fake bans. A month back I had a look at GGC. Seeing as there are so many BF3 servers streaming from them I thought I might better sign up with them too. I quickly discovered that it was super easy to get streaming with them. A little registration and voila. your in. Knowing the 2008 attack on PBBANS I thought to myself, what the heck? That was easy, then I thought this can never be safe. So I decided not to go further and did not start streaming with GGC.

Well turns out it was not safe, many fake bans has been added to GGC’s master ban list. Offcourse GGC could be more mature about it and start with better protecting themselfs. Jet they go onto the offensive. On the pbbans admin forums shortly before the attack on GGC a user found out that the full guid a legit players are posted on GGC. This is not okay. As hackers could use it to spoof your guid. Thats why PBBANS only display the last 8 digits of the guid. Naturally a caught cheaters guid is posted in full. I made a post on the GGC forums about it. What they then did was fix the problem and then say they do not do that. Talking about childish. The thread got moved to a more private section I could not access.

What they are now doing is blaming Evenbalance (the creators of PunkBuster) for the fake bans. Blaming it has a hole in it. Here is quote from a staff member at PBBANS:

“There is no fix. This is a server side problem in all PB games by which a person can hook the server and edit strings in the server memory to have it send false data. If PB could stop that then they could stop hacks from hooking the game.
Technically the same could apply to any system that sends logs to a remote location.”

I hope GGC gets their act together and start acting more professional towards this. Otherwise they might got a lot of angry gamers in their forums.

ah so much trouble getting our Gaming servers running the way we want. With Rackage GSP everything is good. With BSN GSP the easiest thing is one big fucking problem getting solved. Anyone reading this. Only go with BSN if you are French. These guys are Canadian French and speaking english with them is horrible. You get the worst answer back. Lots of times when you state a few problems they reply back answering only one problem. Generally with a wrong answer or an answer in which you are thinking. Are they messing with me?

We finally got our TS3 server running, running in bloody Canada, with the option to move it to Paris, oh cmon give us a break. Unfortunately now my mic is broke. Well ordered a new Razer Carcharias. Lets hope it arrives soon.

Still busy getting ProCon for the 64 man server. It was promised to us we would get ProCon for a total of 3 servers if we rent the server for one year.

Also my Internet is going very slow atm. Tonight I lost my net for 4 hours and now its quite slow during browsing. I guess I am being punished for downloading the first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, around 50GB. Or the modem I got from my ISP can’t handly it. Still I download a lot so I don’t know. I am generally over 300GB a month. I use DU meter to keep track.

Still playing Skyrim a lot. Its such a great game. Can’t wait for the patch though. Talking about patches. Forgot to say the IRNV and the Flashlight in Battlefield 3 still did not get fairly tweaked. I wish they would just remove it from the game. Keep it fun and fair you know.

Going to play some now, haven’t been able to in the past 2 days.

Yes PATCH!!!

Fuck yeah we get to see some fixes!

Now hold on. This is a patch of Dice we are talking about, something must have gone wrong?

Well, the mouse can now be moved in a normal fashion and we can now join a squad of our desire.

So what did they break?

OK, so we did get unranked servers but we cannot start it with less then 4 players.

ah so that means no testing on an unranked server.

I also heard afk kick cannot be turned off.

Oh joy, now you need to keep spamming your jump key while waiting for players, good job Dice (Y)

What about the mouse movement in vehicles and the jet?

Hah still no slider to adjust that. It is still completely not comfortable. Free view in vehicles moves way too fast, same for the gunner seat. Precision aiming with the tank is still out. Still have to try the jet because I had to reset my settings again because rebinding the mouse axis makes left and right inverted and up and down goes from top left to bottom right. Oh and the soflam will probably never be used again. You have to swipe your mouse like crazy to move it around. Its super super slow.

So, another so so patch from Dice again?

Yep, that’s right. They fix some things and break something else.

Even with the bugs the game is great. So I got drawn back to it again. Banished the ghosts by limiting my FPS to 60. Thanks to my recording program DXTORY which has a build in FPS limiter (without recording). Only thing I had to get used to is playing with most controls on default.

One thing that bugs me is that I can never decide which character I am going to play. One moment I play as mage, then I am thinking wish I was melee and vice versa.
Well now playing a Mage only. Before that played a bit of a warrior/archer with a bit of healing. Before that archer only, knight only, moving from heavy armor to light… so many wasted hours

I probably would have been over level 40 now. At least you can play a completely in another way then you did before. So it keeps on being fun.

Ill try and get a video out for Battlefield 3. Going to be recording some team death match games and some squad death match. I really want to upload a full round. It is best to use TDM or SDM for that because Conquest and Rush rounds are simply too long. Hopefully I will have a video up this week.

Wish I could give a great positive little review but nope.

Before I could even start the game I had to reduce my windows speaker audio quality, otherwise it would crash right before the main menu would come up. First suggestion was to set it to 16bit 96k. This worked but ingame dialogues where scrambled up. So now I play the game on 16bit 44k. Such a shame, I had to do the same thing in the game Dead Rising 2. Again bad console porting? Oh noes. Got to wonder if it has anything to do with my creative sound card and their horrible drivers they have.

Well you start as a prisoner again. Going to death row in a sense. Well your not on the list but meh, to the block with him!
It would be a short game if not by some spectacular way you get your freedom.
Here is the first choice which race you are. There are 10 races to choose from. Still they are based on 3 types of characters. A melee/archer/mage. From there you customize your characters appearance and get a quick tutorial while running for your life.
I noticed there is no second option to change anything on your character like in the previous oblivion and fallout. So make your character perfect from the start.

That aside there are some game breaking bugs with the game. I got my mayor bug when I finished a quest and turned it in, shortly after everyone started to attack me. I got a job well done and a title to come with it and them bam, 40 bounty added and I was like wtf?
Reading on the internet it shows this can happen in many stages of the game, where you finish a quest and randomly you get attacked by the towns folk.
Even players who have not done anything wrong, some get attacked at the first quest. How such things can go trough the game testing.
I noticed one of the things that might cause this is by taking items. There are a lot of items that are not displayed as ‘steal: x item’ but just as take item. You get no bounty by taken them but it is weird you can sometimes take all the stuff out of someone’s house because instead of steal it is all displayed as take. Maybe then when you finish a quest and you get some positive “karma” in the town all the take items you took are then calculated as steal. Just my theory.

So now I decided to restart the game again. Started as a archer/thief. Got a bit bored having to sneak around to get your kills and restarted as a pure mage. Great fun having a flamethrower bursting out of your hands or double blasting lightning from both hands, star wars anyone? Guess I might try melee now.

Another thing I have is ghosts! Well you can’t see them but you hear lots of sounds of quick banging on the walls and other times random items just fly trough the room. Scary.
But one annoying thing is again with the keybindings. Ugh, have I not suffered enough with Battlefield 3? Well you can change your controls fine. Still in the menu’s they are displayed as the default bindings and the favorites menu does not work if you change the keybind and they totally do not work anymore when you move it to your mouse buttons.

So because of that I will wait for the first patch to arrive and go back to Battlefield 3. Sigh…