New PUBG Anti-Cheat Measures Deploying Next Week To Enforce Fair Play

It's a sad fact of life that where there are large gaming communities, there is also a large number of folks who'd like to game those communities. In the wildly successful PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds or PUGB for short, cheating is unfortunately rampant, to the point where you don't need to devote much time to playing before spotting extremely peculiar behavior.

As of the time of writing, PUBG currently has 2.5 million players battling it out for that delicious chicken dinner, so it's understandable to a point that cheating is going to exist. However, it also means that a lot more needs to be done to combat that cheating, and based on the latest developer update, there's reason to be optimistic.

In an update posted to Steam, PUBG's Head of Service Management & Anti-Cheat Dohyung Lee details what changes are going to be made next week, and lay the groundwork for battling cheaters more effectively. The company emphasizes the fact that it cares a lot about abolishing cheaters, and that it is in fact taking it seriously. That'd be hard to argue, as we've seen the developers ban thousands of accounts in a single day before on multiple occasions.

Immediate aid will come in the form of a new dedicated team that will focus on battling cheat programs that are running rampant, which complements a new anti-cheat mechanic that will be rolled out to the game next week. While this update should clearly impact cheaters (in a great way), it's also going to affect those who've used outside applications to alter the game's graphics, usually to improve clarity. Interestingly, NVIDIA used PUBG as an example when showing off its new Freestyle feature of Ansel, which allows you to effectively do what the game's developers will soon disallow outside tools to do. It's not yet clear if Freestyle will be affected, but since NVIDIA seems to be pretty chummy with the game's developer, PUBG Corporation, it'll probably get a pass.

Because of these overhauled mechanics, users are not permitted to modify any of the game's files. The wording gives us the impression that not all files are going to trigger an issue, but any files that have to do with the game's mechanics certainly would.

Lastly, there's one more bit of bad news, at least for those who use family sharing on Steam. Because exploits have been identified, PUBG's developer has decided to disable the family sharing feature. Admittedly, this likely doesn't affect a great number of players, but it's an unfortunate change, nonetheless. At least it comes with a good upside: that cheaters are actively being taken care of. We just need to hope that players will actually notice the difference in-game sooner than later.