Support for PunkBuster (anti-cheat) for Quake III Arena officially ended in September 2011.
The Quake III Arena source code was released to the public on August 19, 2005, under the GNU GPL v2 license.
Official support for Quake III Arena by id Software ended around 2006.
The ioquake3 project — which later became the foundation for many engines (including Quake3e) — has existed since 2005.
Even after PunkBuster support ended, ioquake3 continued to evolve, meaning PunkBuster could no longer be officially integrated into modern versions of the engine.

The absence of PunkBuster effectively created a paradise for cheaters.

Of course, one can still host a server on the original engine with PunkBuster enabled and only allow clients using PunkBuster to connect. Installing the client version of PunkBuster is not difficult.
The real issue is that modern engines no longer support PunkBuster, and very few people today are willing to play on outdated engines. Players have grown accustomed to modern quality standards.

Offering small rewards, such as Steam game keys or in-game achievements, could motivate fair play — but the bigger question remains:
How can we effectively tackle cheating today?

I think that if someone can solve the problem of cheating, then it will be possible to organize small prize pools and tournaments.

wrote:

The absence of PunkBuster effectively created a paradise for cheaters.
[...]

How can we effectively tackle cheating today?

I think that if someone can solve the problem of cheating, then it will be possible to organize small prize pools and tournaments.

PunkBuster did catch cheaters so eventhough it sucked, it was a great option.
for example you could use punkbuster to request a client screenshot which the client then sends to the server.

the problem is that cheats translated from being hooked to the game to being outside of the game or even outside of the pc.

we in e+ saw the opportunity to create a simple completly server side anticheat which makes it hard to bypass - after all it doesn't run under the control of the cheater.

that way we basically solved the issue of this topic compared to all other q3 mods.

lately we have upgraded our capabilities at detecting cheats, but the ultimate method to proof cheating or not is request a high quality handcam and live gameplay or even live screen recording. per houseright, communitys can block out cheaters by suspicion. everyone involved only has to talk to each other. the other thing is that people need to be invested in the skills that are needed to be good at a game, eventhough only theoretical. a good example would be nadekings one way smokes in counter strike 2. its simple knowledge, but not knowing it sucks. or rail hum. or enemymodels. the list is endless

if you followed my youtube channel, it turns out 70% lg might be possible but thats in making.

wrote:

Let's say I want to organize a competitive process. Perhaps I'll create achievements as messages in the server's MOTD or a minimum prize pool to generate interest.

1. First of all, I need to learn to track this in my players:
AutoShot
AIMBot
WallHack
2. I need to train the referee.
3. I need to automate the tracking process to relieve the workload on myself and the referee.

Is this even possible without interfering with packet data processing?
What's the best place to start learning?

1 - know the cheats, test cheats out in a save enviroment. it enhances your ability to see cheats.I can also give you some demoes here and there2 - you need to coop with the ref, not master him.3 - enforce demos and instead do it on a demand basis. surveiling all players all the time is more of a north korea move.
the best you can do is keep the playing field even, not prevent all cheaters.about quake packets - they are designed as UDP since any packet thats even a moment late is irrelevant to the game. what the quake3 defrag servers do is save the server stream and therefor has the most accurate demoes.

in the ideal scenario for cheaters, they have the source code for the anticheat and work around it.
its a cat and mouse game, the more we know about cheats, the better our anticheat. the more they know about the anticheat, the less invisible it is.about the E+ anticheat, it tracks stuff like hitbox, mouseclicks and mouse movement vector. the anticheat level only determines which shots are unlikely and how many of those are needed to autokick a suspicious person. that also explains why we can not check for wallhack. xp_anticheatlevel 3 takes care of most autoshoots and aimbot due to click/hitbox/vector mismatch. you also can not disable the anticheat, you can only disable autokick.

there is a problem with this though - netcode is jerky, so depending on frame mismatches, stuff can either accidently count as cheat or a cheat can accidently count as clean.
so once your anticheat determined someone to be a cheater, you need to do manual effort to verify it and then you give the cheater a choice, either handcam to show he is really doing it and finding out the truth or ban.

what you really need to do is understand more about cheats and then you need a tool for it (which I can not give atm, maybe later) to do the work you want to do.
when you want to learn about cheats, here you have two youtube videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9alJwQG-Wbk

also here is the general wikipedia link you want to read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games

you also wont ever get 100% proof that someone is cheating that you can not spot with the eye. the truth is, to know that someone is cheating he needs to bust himself. for everything else you can only belief in somebody is cheating or not.