We managed to skip this story last week somehow, but here’s the short version – a bunch of anti-Punkbuster hacktivists issued a series of fake Battlefield 3 player bans to prove that Punkbuster sucks or something.
The hackers targeted servers using the GGC-Stream service, which uses information from Punkbuster to identify and ban cheaters.
“We have selected ggc-stream as the target since they have the most streaming bf3 servers and makes it very easy to add fake bans,” wrote anonpbspoofer on the Artificial Aiming forum. “In 2011 we hit them with a mass ban wave and now we are banning real players from battlelog while ggc-stream is totally unaware. We have framed 150+ bf3 players alone.”
Of course, because they went around telling everybody about it, EA has been able to reverse the bans.
“Together with the 3rd party service providers we have taken steps to remove the faulty bans, and improve the protection against future fake bans,” publisher rep Kusa_EA has posted on the Battlelog blog.
“We have determined that the root cause resulting in the server bans is not directly related to Battlefield 3, but rather related to select 3rd party services which server owners can use in conjunction with PunkBuster to protect their servers.
“If you are able to log in to Battlelog, your account has not been banned by EA or DICE so there is no need to contact Customer Support.”
For those people still having problems, Kusa_EA added that they “are continuing to investigate what may be causing this issue with some servers.”
Console gamers are unaffected.
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