PUBG Is Banning An Insane Number Of Cheaters

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Cheaters
(Image credit: PUBG Corporation)

The launch of PUBG Corporation's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds in mainland China is fast approaching, and in preparation for that launch the developers and the publisher, Tencent, have been going on a banning spree to reduce cheaters in the game. Well, it's not just China where the cheaters are getting cleaned up, it's also happening for people cheating no matter where they are in the world. This resulted in more than 100,000 instances related to cheating patterns popping up and PUBG Corp., proceeding to ban thousands of players as a result.

Over on the Steam community page, there's a post about the new Blue Zone testing phase and the anti-cheat measures in place in order to aggressively weed out cheaters as the developers continue to establish and grow the player base for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

The post explains that the developers have discovered a new pattern of cheats, and proceeded to review data of 10 million player accounts. After analyzing tens of millions of data logs, footage, and player statistics, the developers managed to identify over 100,000 instances of a pattern related to some form of cheating. Players associated with this cheat will be permanently banned in a single wave.

But the team isn't stopping there. There will be continued measures in place to filter through the data logs and continue to scour the data to ban players suspected of cheating, along with implementing a new algorithm as part of the anti-cheat team to detect and ban the cheaters without having to manually scour through all the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds logs.

But that's not all. PUBG Corporation is also still putting effort into the new deathcam report feature that allows players to view and report potential cheaters through the replay feature. There were some issues with the replay insofar that it made it look like there was no recoil in the replay and it created some false positives. However, the company has quickly rectified the problem.

These anti-cheat measures were ramped up slightly after Tencent Games purchased a stake in distributing PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds at the tail end of 2017. In late December, Tencent took some measures into its own hands by working with local authorities in China to arrest more than 120 cheat distributors, as reported by US Gamer.

While the issue isn't just the distribution of cheats, Tencent wanted to cut down on player's access to premium cheat services. This enabled PUBG Corporation to utilize an anti-cheat group to focus on weeding out and removing the remainder cheaters from the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds player pool.

Cheats have been the biggest complaint from gamers, alongside ping. While network engineers continue to work on improving the infrastructure and matchmaking, PUBG Corporation and Tencent became proactive in whittling down the presence cheats in the Battle Royale survival game.

Tencent is banking on the game being big in mainland China, and so there's been a huge and very aggressive push to clean up all the cheaters in the game, regardless of the region.

Thankfully, Xbox One gamers don't have to worry about the cheaters for now and have been flocking to the game after it launched in December. Once PUBG Corporation gets the optimization sorted and the game properly balanced, there are also plans to launch the game on the PS4.

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.