Have you found yourself banned in Battlefield 3 through no fault of your own? Have you pleaded innocence, only to have others peer down on you with a knowing “yeah….sure!” look of derision? I mean, most Battlefield 3 servers use the tried and tested Punkbuster to stop cheaters and hackers, right?

Don’t worry; we believe you. According to Kotaku, a group of Punkbuster-hating hackers have managed to get legitimate, innocent players banned from servers that utilise the anti-cheating service.

"We are bringing back the unerring of punkbuster back for a 3rd season,” said anonpbspoofer on cheating site Artificial Aiming’s forums. “We have selected ggc-stream as the target since they have the most streaming bf3 servers and makes it very easy to add fake bans,"

"We have selected ggc-stream as the target since they have the most streaming bf3 servers and makes it very easy to add fake bans. In 2011 we hit them with a mass ban wave and now were are banning real players from battlelog while ggc-stream is totally unaware. We have framed 150+ bf3 players alone."

It’s not exactly a widespread problem – but it’s certainly a problem if paying customers are getting locked out of games because other people are idiots. Not cool. EA is aware of the problem , and is looking in to it. In the meantime, they’ve issued a temporary workaround for affected players.

"We are aware that some Battlefield 3 players are experiencing connection issues with PunkBuster enabled servers. This problem is limited to a small subset of players on PC and will not impact players on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.”

"We are actively looking into the specifics of this issue and we are confident that we will have a permanent solution in place shortly. In the meantime, if a player’s connectivity has been affected, we recommend that in the interim they join servers that are not running PunkBuster. There is a filter setting for this in the multiplayer server browser."

The only problem then is that you’ll be playing on servers without anti-cheating systems…but hey, at least you’ll be playing, right?