I’ve seen my share of suspect deaths playing PUBG, but that was a shock when I was glancing over PUBG’s latest update on its anti-cheat measures. The update gives us a broad look at PUBG’s ongoing efforts to combat cheaters. The dev team even developed a machine learning technique “that can detect abnormal game patterns or actions that interrupt the normal operations of the game coming from hack users.”
The volume of cheat reports is crazy. A typical day for PUBG’s anti-cheat team has them going over 3TB worth of game logs from over 10 million reports. Suspicious patterns are picked out of all the data and go through a verification process according to the developers. If a cheat is detected, the account is banned.
The report feedback system was first introduced last August. From August 23rd to November 30th, more than 100 million reports were filed by PUBG players. And multiple players in a single match who suspect a hacker was killing them were often right.
“83% of users that received multiple reports in a single session were permanently banned, so if anyone ever thinks their report doesn’t matter, your reports are going a long way towards a fair battleground,” the anti-cheat team writes.
Here’s a bar chart visualizing the sheer volume of reports coming on during the Aug-Nov period.
PUBG is doing what they can to respond to hackers in real-time, but their ultimate goal is to find the places that are selling the hacks and stop them there. The team says they have more than 100 people monitoring places that sell the hacks. Plus, the team is taking legal action against hackers in China and Korea with 200+ arrested across the two countries in 2018.
The anti-cheat team writes that combating these hacks will continue. “We will continue to devote ourselves to this task and while what we have shared today are still early steps in this battle, we will not stop researching and developing new anti-cheat technologies to eliminate as many hack programs, and their developers, as possible.”
In other PUBG news, a new content update is live adding two new vehicles to Vikendi, improvements to the Replay Editor, and the flare gun as a map spawn on all maps.