APB Reloaded to Crack Down on Botters

For some reason I impulse-bought All Points Bulletin about a month before RealTime Worlds went under. It was pants. Most annoying was that you could spend hours customising your character, creating the most amazing tattoos that look beautiful in the high-res character viewer. Then you’d go in-game and discover that a bird has shat down your back.

New owners GamersFirst have just invited former players to a closed beta. I had a potter around the APB Reloaded blog today and am glad to see that they’re sorting out the aimbot problem.

PunkBuster was able to successfully detect every single commercially available aimbot for APB. Over 1000 cheating players were silently identified and logged by the system, but unfortunately RTW was already having financial difficulties by then and we never had the opportunity to get our hands on the list of cheaters to ban them (since once you stop paying the people with the info, they are unlikely to give it to you)…

…This isn’t set in stone yet, and some parts of it may not even be finished during beta, but this is what we would like to work towards:

If a player is positively identified as running a known aimbot, he/she will be immediately kicked from the district and a notification message will be sent to all other players in that district. The cheater’s account and PC will be immediately banned for a period of time, during which the person will not be able to play using that account on any computer. If an aimbot is detected a second time, the account and computer will immediately be permanently banned, all monies paid will be forfeited and any upgrades or customizations will be revoked…

…there really is no excuse for aimbotting and this time around it will be treated with zero tolerance.

By giving people two chances they certainly have an interesting definition of zero tolerance… still, it’s nice to see they’re taking bot problems seriously.

If you’re interested, sign up for the APB Reloaded closed beta on the official website.