We've been punked! *UPDATE 1*

BASH has just received a straightforward reply from Evenbalance regarding the lag induced by their latest Punkbuster update.

As you can read in the BASH article We've been punked!, Evenbalance has added two background processes that run while Call of Duty (or any other Punkbuster enabled game) is running; namely: PnkBstrA.exe and PnkBstrB.exe.

A few days ago, we opened a ticket with Evenbalance and asked them the following questions:

While we greatly appreciate all the efforts you folks are doing to keep us playing in a Cheat-Free environment, the lag induced by the new update has caused some issues.

Can you explain what has caused the lag and if there are any solutions to mitigate it. Currently there are community workarounds.

I have posted a few on my blog. I am sure you cannot sanction such activity; however, can you suggest what we CAN do? Currently your 2 new executables (PnkBstrA and B) are eating up a significant amount of CPU resources and undoubtedly contributing to a slowdown in-game. I would greatly appreciate any information you can provide my readers/listenership.

Glenn Courington, from Evenbalance, replies:

04/16/2007 14:39:41 - "Glenn Courington"

Note #2: As your blog states, yes, these new services will take additional CPU cycles, as this is by design to use CPU cycles that aren't allocated to the game or other processes.

As for the "solutions" posted, no, those wouldn't be solutions. While it hasn't been initiated yet, it will soon be required to run these services to play on a PB server. Uninstalling them or turning them off will result in a kick from the server.

As for lag issues, we have been making updates to correct such issues, and we will continue to do so as needed.

http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=pbsvcfaq.php

So there you have it. Please ensure that you do NOT remove the PunkBuster background processes.

Hopefully, Evenbalance will sort out the lag issues.

If anyone is having lag issues, please let us know. You can email us here at BASH:

jockyitch@devil-dogz.com



Additional articles:

remove those un-needed processes
protect yourself from malware