Since launch, players of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds have been complaining that the game has a cheating problem and a common solution has been region locking. In essence, the move would keep players from regions with less cheaters away from regions with more.

It seems that PUBG Corp, the developer behind PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, has heard these calls and has added region locking. The region locking is designed to restrict players to their own region unless they are playing with a friend from another region. But in a surprising twist of events, it seems that many members of the community are lambasting the company for introducing the feature, saying that it is actually causing problems rather than solving them.

The game's Steam forums are now flooded with complaints about the feature, begging and pleading with PUBG Corp to fix it. Going through these forum threads, the most common complaint seems to be that people are still being matchmade with cheaters.

Disgruntled players say that the majority of the cheaters appear to be from China, which corroborates information stated by BattlEye (PUBG's anti-cheat software) about cheater locations in 2017. Some players even argue that by introducing region locking, PUBG Corp. has given Chinese players the "go ahead" to play in any region that they want.

Many players in China use VPNs in order to access the game and avoid severe lag. VPN use is so heavy that PUBG was review bombed for promoting these VPNs in-game instead of introducing local servers.

It could be that the use of VPNs means that many Chinese players are not impacted by the new region locking. Plus, with the player base no longer spread out across all regions, both players who cheat and Chinese players seem to be appearing frequently in NA/EU matches.

At this point, it's unclear what PUBG Corp. plans to do to solve the problem. Whenever there is a new PUBG update the comments on Steam are almost instantly flooded with calls to region lock the game. But, how does the developer address the problems introduced with region locking if region locking is a much-asked-for feature? Players are clearly unhappy and many will be hoping for a solution (whatever that may look like) soon.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is out now for iOS, Android, PC, and Xbox One.

Source: Steam