Dev Letter: Anti-Cheat Actions

Last month update 7.2 was released, which brought the long-awaited Ranked Mode to the Battlegrounds.

While PUBG Corp. were expecting some cheaters to emerge in this mode, they’d hoped their new safeguards such as SMS verification would help prevent it. Unfortunately, this did not have the effect they’d hoped for and additional countermeasures will now have to be added.

Ranked games depend heavily on the reliability of the service, so today we’d like to talk about what we’re doing to improve our anti-cheat safeguards and increase our ban intensity.

• Preliminary Measures – When players use cheats in a match, we will utilize immediate countermeasures to minimize the impact on legitimate players.
  • Additionally, we will improve the system to immediately ban the kicked user.
  • If the cheat used is easy for game logic to recognize, we will kick the cheater in real time. (This has already been applied as of June 3rd, 2020.)

• Post Measures – Cheaters use sophisticated methods to get around systems designed to stop them, so we’re also reinforcing additional measures to help our efforts.
  • We have analyzed the patterns of players who unfairly raise their rank and have added logic to quickly detect and automatically ban the perpetrators.
  • We are dedicating more people to Leaderboard monitoring to ban the players who climb the leaderboard through unfair methods.
  • We will monitor the top ranked players constantly and will not let cheaters stay on the leaderboard for long. We will even be monitoring players’ results, even previous results, if there is any doubt.
  • We are making sure that any players who receive bans cannot be listed on the Leaderboard. (This has already been applied as of June 3rd, 2020.)
  • We will expand the range of monitoring on any users in doubt.
  • We will also be banning cheaters by analyzing the cheats that falsify gun-based logs.
  • We’ve begun to implement a greater number of hardware bans by improving the hardware ban system. (This has already been applied as of June 3rd, 2020.)
  • A mobile authenticator later this year.

If these measures still do not have the impact we expect, we have other measures we are ready to introduce, including increased ban durations against repetitive wrongdoers and raising the entry bar for Ranked mode to make it more difficult for cheaters with new accounts to re-enter Ranked Mode.

We’re thrilled so many of you are loving Ranked Mode and we hate cheaters just as much as you do. As long as there is money to be made from these cheat programs, the problem will never stop, but we’re dedicated to fighting this issue as fiercely as we can. We want the same thing you do, a fair and fun environment where you can show off your skills and see where you stand in Battlegrounds history.

Thank you.