PUBG: Battlegrounds, the popular Battle Royale game is in the middle of a huge cheating crackdown. One of the game’s main developers, KRAFTON Inc., has made a new announcement via their anti-cheat team’s blog stating that they are going to the root of the problem. They also reassured the community that they are doing everything they can to tackle this cheating epidemic.
Big Numbers Being Banned
“Every week, the PUBG: Battlegrounds Anti-Cheat Team identifies and imposes permanent bans on an average of 60,000 to a maximum of about 100,000 accounts involved in the use, distribution, or sale of illegal software.” as reported by PCGamer.com.
This raises the question of why players encounter these cheaters at all then. KRAFTON has touched on this question by saying they realize that a more comprehensive approach is necessary. They can not just continually ban accounts around the clock. They need a fundamental solution to analyze and track the accounts that are actively cheating.
Their main focus is on accounts that use these “hacks” in PUBG-ranked play. This splits into two categories, hijacked accounts and accounts that exploit the Survival Mastery Level System. 85% of the permanently banned accounts were created before PUBG: Battlegrounds became free to play in January 2022. However, this does not mean that these accounts have been cheating for ages and are just now getting caught. It means that scammers are getting their hands on legitimate accounts and either using them themselves or selling them to other cheaters.
The Survival Mastery Level System does not allow new accounts to play ranked until they have reached level 80. Unfortunately, certain vendors establish what they call workshops. Workshops allow players to gain Mastery Level points. They use these to boost new accounts or hacked accounts for the purpose of selling them.
KRAFTON’s Crackdown
KRAFTON Inc. has had enough and wants to continue its crackdown on these hacked accounts. So the PUBG anti-cheat team “initiated the development of a machine learning model that could learn the characteristics and patterns of Mastery Level abuse.” It began to be used this year and Krafton has “expanded and refined the criteria for detecting disruptive players” and found great success.
“The number of bans issued against disruptive accounts has increased by over threefold compared to the period before the introduction of this model. Furthermore, the internal monitoring process for suspected disruptive players/accounts has shown continuous improvement. The number of monitored account vendors has decreased. We have also observed an increase in the prices of these accounts.” Hopefully, that is the beginning of the end for the PUBG: Battlegrounds cheating epidemic.
Image Credits: YouTube.com/PUBG: Battlegrounds .
Emma Taylor