PUBG Bans 100,000 Known Cheaters Over the Weekend

If you have a popular multiplayer game, it’s going to be a constant and uphill struggle against cheaters, hackers, and bot-users. The consequences of getting caught can vary from company to company (League of Legends developer Riot Games will give you a warning, while Epic Games will literally sue you) but it seems no matter how gentle or hard your hand the idea of simply dominating the competition effortlessly is too enticing for people to pass up on.

And the most recent game to suffer from that is PlayerUnknown’s Battleground. While I would argue it defeats the purpose of the game to ensure you get easy wins every time, there are lots and lots of people who still prefer cheating there over anywhere else. But over the weekend, 100,000 of those people will have to get their cheater’s high elsewhere, as PUBG Corp announced they had just finished implementing massive, sweeping ban across its entire userbase.

We recently discovered a new pattern of cheats in action. This week, we performed a thorough gameplay data review of 10 million players and completed analysis of tens of millions of data logs. Through this exercise, we were able to identify over 100,000 instances of the new pattern related to use of cheat and now we have confirmed that it was clearly an attempt of compromising our game. These players will be permanently banned in a single wave. This is an example of additional measures we will be taking on top of the basic detection systems in place.

Encouraging, of course, but cheaters are only one of the myriad of issues plaguing one of the best games of the year. Another plague addressed in the very same Steam post was… the blue zone, otherwise known as the slowly shrinking wall of death that keeps people on their toes during a match.

Apparently, they’ll be making the following changes to the Blue Zone on the Test Servers over the next few days for testing purposes:

• Slightly decreased the waiting time of the blue zones in mid-to-late phase of a match
• Slightly decreased the shrinking speed of the blue zones in mid-to-late phase (In this phase, blue zones will now move at a slower speed and the travel time of blue zones has slightly increased due to this change)
• Slightly increased the damage per second of the last blue zone

Kind of unrelated, but also neat, I suppose. Can we go back to getting rid of hackers?