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Anonymous
12 years ago

Re: Banned from Punkbuster thread

I do not work for EA, I have no knowledge of this other than what I've read that's publicly available.

EvenBalance makes PunkBuster.  It is not controlled by EA.  That is what makes this a bit tricky.

The message is showing on everyone's account in battlelog.

I noticed it about 6 hours ago, my favorite server has "Banned ____ for 81568" about 6 times a minute where I usually only see several bans during a full match on the same server.

I've been playing most of the night and not had a problem.  I am concerned most definitely but meh it's Friday night and I want to play my game.

I was incorrectly banned on Guild Wars 1.  I cannot even put into words what I felt.. so many emotions.  It was corrected within several hours.

I would not expect this to get turned around that quickly (Due to EA/DICE doesn't control PB bans), perhaps a few days (110% guess from my buttocks) if you've been incorrectly banned.  (you know if it's incorrect or not because you know if you use cheats or don't).

I seen on the regular Battlelog forums that it's common for PB to have between 1-5% incorrect bans that were lifted for their most popular games, so it isn't a perfect system... a mass incorrect ban like this is scary.

I'm not letting it stop me from enjoying BF4 tonight.... perhaps my last words hehe

Good luck to all who were incorrectly banned, I hope it gets overturned quickly for you.

1 Reply

  • The message everyone is seeing in Battlelog is just a news/status ticker and is not specifically targeted at you. It just lets everyone know  if there are any possible issues that you might experience when you launch a game.

    It's an automatic punkbuster ban, false positive triggered by who knows what. Has nothing to with with server admins.

    Ignore the message and play as usual. If you get banned you will know because it will happen in-game while you are playing and you will get a message in battlelog saying you were kicked for 2 minutes by punkbuster for GAMEHACK 81#### (not exactly sure of the number).

    If this is the case wait patiently for news of an update (will probably appear in battlelog in the same place) , and update punkbuster. Be sure to run the updater in your punkbuster folder within the battlefield 4 folder and you should be good to go. (no point in trying until you see some news about it)

    Pretty standard stuff, don't know why everyone is panicing and asking why they are banned based on a Battlelog ticker message without actually trying to launch a game. Battlelog doesn't know if you're banned because it's not connected to punkbuster. You would only find out when you try to launch a game and you get kicked back to battlelog with a message stating you were banned by punkbuster.

    FWIW if you do get banned by punkbuster you can still play on unranked servers that are not running punkbuster. To filter for these in the server browser, uncheck official and ranked and check unranked. Just beware that non-punkbuster servers frequently run non-standard settings or have actual hackers playing on them. Also, you will not earn points towards rank and may not be able to use unlocked weapons/modifications but you will be able to play a bit.

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