Earlier this week, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds launched a fairly innocuous PC patch that targeted bugs and client optimisation. "We are hoping to give you an update on what we have been working on soon", said PUBG Corp in this forum post.
Soon is now, it seems, as the developer has announced it will ban 100,000 cheaters in a "single wave" following a comprehensive data review. Moreover, balance adjustments have been applied to the blue zone, which will first appear on test servers.
"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," explains PUBG Corp in this Steam Community post. "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. We will continue to check the data logs like this even if it means the anti-cheat team has to filter through hundreds of billions of data logs manually."
The dev adds that despite recently encouraging players to report cheaters directly from replay mode, a bug tied to the game's deathcam and observing system—"it looks like there is no recoil even for a player who is not using a cheat"—has caused non-cheaters to be inadvertently flagged. It is of course working to iron this out.
As for the blue zone, the following changes will be applied and tested over the coming days:
- 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.
Since launching in full at the end of last year, it seems PUBG Corp has doubled down on stomping out cheaters. But let me now turn this over to you lot: are cheaters less frequent in your games? Share you thoughts and experiences in the comments south of here.
