Punkbuster and Battlefield 2142

So I went to play some 2142 today.  Finally got enough hours to get Veteran Assault so I figure I’ll jump in a game a Cerber Landing and BAM 15 minutes later have the badge.  Got into the game with the round almost over.  Popped in 8 kills with no deaths then round end.  Looked at my round stats and my accuracy for the Assault Rifle is 3400%.  OK, weird I thought but whatever.  Next round starts and suddenly punkbuster is bitching at me about missing packets and then I get kicked.   So I think, “Ok, screwy server then.”  I move on.  Next sever immediately I get the punkbuster crap.  “Maybe my dsl is being screwy,” I think so I restart my modem and router.  Back in the game get into a round near the end and manage to finish the round.  Next round… kicked again by punkbuster!

And this point I shout out a loud “WTF?!!!”

I check EA’s Battlefield site.  No news about it.  I talk to Your Mom (yes your’s) and he doesn’t seem to be having a problem.  finally I make it to punkbusters site and I see they released a new punkbuster update TODAY.  I also see that punkbuster should update itself automatically.  Well guess what?  It isn’t working!  I download their updater utility and run it.  It gets the update and installs it.  Great!  Maybe now it will work.  Join a game… same problem!

At this point I’m extra pissed and just decide to re-install the whole damn game.  (Yeah I wanted the Veteran Assault pretty bad)

Well a good half hour to an hour later It’s re-installed and patched.  Thankfully I remembered to save my controls.con file before doing it to save me some hassle, however a good 5-6 minutes of shader optimization quickly takes away that little victory.

So back in the game, but wait!  30 seconds later it’s kick Spender time again for missing punkbuster packets!  “Son of a Bitch!!!!”

So I retry the punkbuster update tool and restart my computer to find a new extra process running in the background.  One Mr. “PnkBstrA.exe”.  Note this was not running after I applied the update, but before I restarted.  Turns out that the new version of punkbuster requires this process running in the background to work.  Gay!

So I want to thank the Assholes at punkbuster for releasing a poorly executed patch to a system that does jack shit and wasting 3 hours of my time so I could get the 15 minutes of play time needed to get my damn badge.  I also want to thank them for adding ANOTHER background process to my system.  I just can’t get enough of those!  Thanks a lot douche bags!

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2 Responses to Punkbuster and Battlefield 2142

  1. While I spammed this comment at first, I’m going to repost it from the email sent to me to notify me of it.

    Author : jay (IP: 84.58.179.37 , dslb-084-058-179-037.pools.arcor-ip.net)
    E-mail : jay@jayjay.com
    URL :
    Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=84.58.179.37
    Comment:
    Better read than complain: http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=pbsvcfaq.php

    I want to start this one with who the hell are you “Jay”? This post hasn’t been up more than 12 hours, I haven’t even announced this log to anyone and I already have stalkers! Are they built into wordepress or something?!

    It must be that you found this site from some google search involving Battlefield 2142 and Punkbuster. Why did you search this? Having the same issue maybe? If so, then what’s with the smart ass comment?

    Now, in response to the content of the comment. I did read that page “Jay” thank you very much. It mentions a service and that particular .exe I mentioned in the post. Well that’s great and all, but what it doens’t mention (at this date) is that you need to reboot your computer before the process, and probably the service, start so if you manually updated then immediately went in and tried to play the game again like I did you’d experience the same problem. One would think the manual updater would start this service/process combo upon completing the update, but noooo.

    The point of this post is that punkbuster is retarded. It’s “auto-update” didn’t do it’s job, and the manual update doesn’t finish the job without the user needing to figure out on their own that they need to reboot. An additional point is that it sucks that now I, and anyone else who plays 2142, has to have another background process running all the time. Why can’t they make it so the process only runs when a punkbuster enabled game is running? Would that really have been so hard?!

    Finally, as I’ve said, punkbuster is worthless. Even with it I’ve seen plenty of cheaters. For example, I’ve seen a guy jump in the air and go prone, toss a RDX pack and land on top of it on his stomache, detonate it thus killing all the enemies around him, but yet he doesn’t take any damage? How does that work? And did punkbuster do anything? No! However, if I go and remove the intro movies so I don’t have to sit through them everytime I start the game, do I get busted? Yes! Punkbuster is a piece of shit and a headache. That’s about all there is to it.

  2. Random says:

    “Finally, as I’ve said, punkbuster is worthless.”

    Couldn’t agree more. While I haven’t played BF2142, i’ve played more than a few other games “protected” by punkbuster. Countless times, i’ve seen PB COMPLETELY IGNORE exploiters / cheaters / hackers / other assorted asshats, and COUNTLESS FRIGGIN TIMES, me and other TOTALLY INNOCENT players have been booted from games for the stupidest reasons…

    PB is worse than having no anti-cheat program.

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