With its launch last year, Tencent’s PlayerUnknown’s Battleground, better known as PUBG has dominated the gaming market with over 200 million downloads and winning Google Play’s Game of the year award. PlayerUnknown’s Battleground is available on various platforms including Android, iOS, Windows and Play Station with about 30 million daily users. With its growing fame, PUBG Mobile was soon adopted as a platform for global gaming competitions.
While there were players who tried their best to outperform their contenders, there were also people who tried to adopt the easier path. Since its launch, hackers have come up with numerous ways to hack into the game to pave their way into the Global Challenge.
In July 2017, PUBG forums started to release a list of players who have faced 3 years ban due to use of various hacks to get undue advantage and from then about 13 million players have been banned by the developers. It must be noted that the development team makes sure that no player is banned due to human error and keeps a complete track of system logs and details to keep evidence of each banned player.
Recently another 30 thousand players were banned in December’18 which included 4 professional players, who were slammed with a three years ban from the game’s North American Esports league. The players were found using Radar hack, something which is a general trend these days, it is said to allow players to shoot through walls, stones and trees while also giving them better accuracy along with greater damage dealt and high armor.
It also tells the player about their opponent’s location making it easier for them to eliminate their foes. The hack uses a VPN on a private server to send and receive data making it difficult to track. Developers have deployed BattlEye software, a proactive anti-cheat protection system, to detect and ban accounts using methods such as radar hacking to win games and competitions. Apart from that the recent updates have also allowed players to report opponents whom they suspect of using cheats and hacks.
The update also allows the player to spectate the opponent who killed him to make sure that there is no error in reporting someone, and they can verify that the player is surely using a hack. It must be noted that the team has different plans for segregating the hackers, while those who used these means in public or local games get a 2 years ban, players who used these hacks in professional gaming have to face a 3 years ban.
Also, teams where one or more players were found using the hack have to remove their convicted players from their roster to regain their standing and to participate in the forthcoming tournaments. Also, players who knew that their teammates were using the hack and still did nothing about it are facing a 2 year ban from the game.
While numerous teams and players have used their social handles to publicly apologize from the developers for their illegal and illicit acts, no decision has been made from the developer’s side.
