PUBG Bans 8K Cheaters in 24 Hours

If you sometimes like using cheat software as you play PUBG, you may soon find you’ve been banned from playing the game at all.

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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG for short) is a monster success for its developers, appealing to a growing audience of active players all over the world. Unfortunately, as is so often true for online competitive games, that audience includes thousands of players who delight in ruining the experience for others by running third-party cheat software.

The game’s publisher is taking the matter seriously and this week announced it has now banned more than 150,000 cheaters since the game launched, including an impressive 8,000 within a recent 24-hour period:

As the tweet notes, cheaters are being detected using BattlEye software, which is designed to run in the background without harassing legitimate players. It’s also more persistent than many alternatives and promises greater consequences for identified cheaters. Game publishers can ban unwanted players based on their SteamID, which makes global bans possible.

The announcement that so many players are being banned didn’t please everyone. Some players spoke up to share stories of that one time they were perfectly innocent and yet somehow got banned in the past. BattlEye searches for known program cheats rather than simply relying on player reports, though, so the likelihood of unfair bans is greatly reduced.

“Above all, the happiness of your players is our measurement for success,” the BattlEye site assures game publishers. “We believe that an anti-cheat should straightforwardly follow its mission and do what it’s meant to do without bothering the player.”

PUBG is still in Open Access, and there are numerous glitches that still need to be resolved. In the past, some players have been banned for exploiting glitches. It’s easy to imagine that some folks were banned for crimes they didn’t even know they committed. This isn’t one such time, however. The players who were banned this week would have had to use cheats to attract attention. Now they can’t play the game at all. Will you miss them?

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