Ahh God Bless you Luk4ward, its nice to see that there still exists some passion in the ET world. Still not too impressed with your tone though, I seem to remember many an hour I spent helping you when you first set up your server and were picking my brain for weeks about everything from basic server and PB configs, to admin_mod and Lua scripting: how times have changed.
I'll quite happily concede that there may be some useful functionality remaining in the PB minguidage feature, but it most certainly does not work in the way Evenbalance originally intended. You may have noticed that when you receive an etkey, it contains the date of generation (I've stuck in some underscores either side):
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PunkBuster Client: Current CdKey=0000001002_20080121_0017111979 -> GUID=568ed8853b2bf1684760a997a25d9c30
We obviously dont have access to each client's etkey, and instead we have to wait and see if PB spits out the age from the pbguid. I believe the cvar sv_minguidage existed from the start, but it wasn't until later in 2003 that Evenbalance did some testing prior to implementation. From my reading-up, the age-reporting never worked properly and too many clients were being kicked despite having guids greater than the required age. To the best of my knowledge, PB-kicking for violations of sv_minguidage was never enabled (I dont know this for sure, it may well have been before my time as a server admin). Certainly when I checked again on my server just now it remains to be the case: pb_sv_minguidage is reported as disabled and sv_minguidage is settable but has no effect.
However, you've seen yourself that PB does still try to figure out the guidage with varying amounts of success. I only ever rarely saw it reported in the "Player GUID Computed" line, but it does sometimes appear if you are running cvar scanning and also in "Lost Connection" lines.
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Player GUID Computed 568ed8853b2bf1684760a997a25d9c30(-) (slot #3) ^1M^7cSteve
[From #3 9c30(VALID:1) ^1M^7cSteve] cg_autoReload = "0"
Lost Connection (slot #3) 568ed8853b2bf1684760a997a25d9c30(VALID:1) ^1M^7cSteve
Everything worked nicely with that guid I created today, but a quick glance at a cross-section of log-files from my server suggested that this was the exception rather than the rule. I'm not about to sit down and count up all the clients that did and did not get their guidages reported, but after a few minutes of string-searching "Lost Connection" in a typical log-file it appears that guidages are coming back in somewhere less than 10% of cases.
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Player GUID Computed xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxe42eec7b(-) (slot #4) ^7Dozy
[From #3 ec7b(?) ^7Dozy] ui_connecting = "0"
Lost Connection (slot #3) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxe42eec7b(?) ^7Dozy
I do admire server admins who spend time trying to provide an enjoyable gaming environment for others, so credit to you for doing so. Maybe your server has a higher success with guidage calculations and if it helps to keep your games cheater and lamer-free then by all means keep using it. However, PB guidages may not be totally broken, but they are most certainly not fully-functional. Face it, if they worked properly Evenbalance would have enabled the cvar long ago.
