"aimbot#51172"

[seX1ar]

I moved my game to my ssd and as soon as I started playing I got instantly banned for "aimbot#51172" I dont know if this is a bug with pb, or a manual ban from you guys.

Approx 1 hour after my ban, a good friend of mine also got banned on your server with the same ban message. We're both streaming our gameplay most of the time, and none of us has cheated of course.

I thought my ban had something to do with me moving my game to my ssd and some none whitelisted program on my ssd got me banned. (Since pb dont whitelist programs anymore). And I do have a program called "Cisco Packet Tracer" on my ssd, which led me to believe that it was that program that got me banned. So I quickly deleted it and bought a new copy of the game since its dirt cheap. And boom, everything was fine again.

What now made me question that it was in fact my program "Cisco Packet Tracer" that got me banned, is the fact that my friend who does not have that program also got banned. I know he does not cheat. So i'd assume that what got him banned is also what got me banned. Since it was within such a short period of time of each other, and both had the exact same ban message and both came off the exact same server.

I'd love to hear your take on this, and/or if this is something you have experienced before. I have already appealed my ban but I dont assume i'll get an answer any time soon, as evenbalance are notoriously bad at replying to their ban appeals.

I already posted this once in the bc2 forum. I deleted my old post to move it here, as it seemed more fitting.

[[RC]Hunter]

Hi,

This ban message looks like a punkbuster engine ban.
I can assure that no manual ban from our side took place.

I am not sure if the Cisco program may caused it or not, but there have been plenty of tools in the past decades causing false positives and they got corrected after a while. Punkbuster has been one of the most reliable tools to detect cheats, but since it does monitor in various technical aspects, it cannot be bullet proof so to speak.

Appealing your ban @ EvenBalance is the right approach, the response time is known to be slow but there will be a response to your request. At least this has been the case in previous years.

Since the Punkbuster Engine is no longer developed for many years now, all software vendors went to different cheat protection software tools and Evenbalance did not gain any new partner. But personally I believe this was on purpose by EvenBalance. However, even if there has been no new game added, there are still contracts in regards to the older titles, so the engine itself remains actively monitored.

Once new cheats are released into the market - even for such old titles like BC2 - they are analyzed and added to the detection, but only "activated" after a while. Once the trigger has been enabled, we always see a new wave of bans.

Make sure to understand, I am not saying you or your friend are cheating / were cheating. I am not in the position to judge anything in this aspect, since the monitoring and final ban was applied by EvenBalance. Did you both were banned for same message code? (51172)

[[RC]BooZer]

Yes, I can confirm that this ban was not a manual one but one by the punkbuster engine ... just look at this link:

https://www.clusterwars.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4667

[seX1ar]

Yeah an appeal has already been written to evenbalance.
Thanks for your insights.