Cheating is a problem in any online game, but it’s even worse in a battle royale situation where massive counts of players are all trying to be the very best. Bluehole have not been shy about banning unsporting combatants in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and PlayerUnknown himself has revealed that those bans have been increasing exponentially.
I didn’t think we needed to, but maybe we should add ‘don’t cheat’ to our list of what not not to do in PUBG.
150,000 cheaters have been banned from the battleground courtesy of BattleEye, and 8,000 of those have been within the past 24 hours according to Brendan Greene.
.@TheBattlEye has now banned over 150,000 cheaters from @PUBATTLEGROUNDS, with more than 8,000 banned in the last 24 hours alone! GG WP
— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) September 13, 2017
We reported in August that 50,000 bans had been handed down since the game’s launch, so it seems that about 100,000 players have been kicked within little over a month. Even with those impressive stats, BattleEye figure there’s always more work to do.
Battle Royale games are a real "mess" to protect. Everyone wants to be the sole winner no matter what. We are always doing our best. (2/2)
— BattlEye (@TheBattlEye) September 13, 2017
Oh, and if you’re kicking back for a nasty comment about overzealous protection against stream sniping, Greene’s ready for you.
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— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) September 13, 2017
The massive increase in bans is the result of ever more robust detection systems, but also the result of PUBG’s seemingly unending growth. The game reached ten million copies sold earlier this month, and passed a million concurrent Steam users just a few days afterward. It’s only the second game in history to hit the latter milestone after Dota 2, and now it’s regularly beating Valve’s monolithic MOBA in the most-played charts. Somehow, I doubt they’re missing those last 150,000 users very much.