We are also working on a new facility that will be added to an upcoming version of PunkBuster. We're tentatively calling this "PunkBuster Player Power". Probably everyone who has played online FPS games for more than a few hours knows that there are little punks out there whose only purpose for playing seems to be in ruining the fun of other participants ... they are sometimes refered to as team killers, door blockers, spammers, etc. This new system will allow PB Server Admins to reward their trusted, regular players with a power rating that will give them more weight when it comes time to remove a punk who is ruining gameplay. Additionally, players who have caused trouble in the past can be completely stripped of the power to vote at all. Even the tightest run good public servers still have periods when no admins are around and this new facility is designed to help decent players keep the play fun when no admins are around. When kicked, these little punks will not be able to immediately rejoin as with the current vote-kick system. Also, since it works with slot numbers, the punks who change their name to match the name of innocent players will not be able to hide like they sometimes can now. This facility is currently being tested and we hope to release it within a few days. Of course, PB Admins will have the choice to disable this feature if desired.
In other news, some of you may have seen that Christian Anktow (also known as Xian) who works at id Software has announced that he is doing some testing on a couple of the public id RtCW servers. One component of what he is testing just happens to be another soon-coming PB Admin feature, what we're calling the PunkBuster Server WebTool for RtCW. Christian is asking for players to pound on these 2 servers over the next few days so he can evaluate several aspects of what is being tested. The servers are:
192.246.40.45:27960 - Xian's MP_DESTRUCTION Server
192.246.40.45:27961 - Xian's MP_BASE Server
He is asking anyone who has any problems on these servers during the next few days to contact him.