'Bustin Punks'
Tony Ray walks tall and cracks cheaters heads..
Computr Gaming World
November 2003 issue 232 by George Jones
When programmer Tony Ray found he was consistently toiling against squads using cheat scripts and aimbots, the father of two decided he'd seen enough.
"We were playing one day," Ray explained."And the cheating was just out of control. I started getting so angry at these guys, and I thought to myself,'Those little.... Man, we're going to bust those punks."
A sucessful network and business programmer, Ray went back to his Houston home and began coding a 10,000 line program that would allow a game serve to check gamers systems for imperfections that indicate the presence of a cheat.
"Initially only 10 servers tried it," Ray recalls,"But once the program detected the first aimbot-it took off like wildfire." Ray pauses, relishing that first sweet bust. "People who didn't believe cheaters were out thwere started believing real quick." One Thousand leagues picked up 'PunkBuster' in it's first month of release.
These days, Punkbuster supports Quake3, return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Soldier of Fortune11, but Ray and his globe-spanning crew of 16 are just beginning to capture the gaming industries attention. "I have monumental respect for those guys,"enthuses former Blizzard North co-founder Bill Roper, who witnessed firsthand the devastating effects cheating had on Diablo. 'It's a thankless task , and it requires so much work."
Andre Roy, online producer for Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield and a new PunkBuster devotee couldn't agree more. 'Cheating kills the fun factor," Roy says. "When a few bad apples show up with their cheats, it drives the real players out."
Not anymore! Punkbuster is on the beat, and publishers that need ongoing support are even paying ray and his group to police up games. Up next: massively multiplayer online games. "We're really interested in ensuring that massively multiplayer games are fair," Ray states, "We kind of see ourselves as a doping commission of sorts for gaming."
With cheaters everywhere, and multiplayer play increasing, it seems Ray and his avengers will definately be busy for awhile.
How about this Skuzzy??? AH could definately make use of this!
raidr