Not too long ago, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds creator Brendan Greene stated that "region locking just doesn't work" when it comes to being a useful solution for curbing the rise of cheaters from China in the popular Battle Royale title. Now, however, a recent update on the game's Steam page has gone so far as to suggest that Bluehole Studio's parent company, PUBG Corp., is "considering" the use of region-locking servers so as to provide a "stable network experience" for those all who play the game.

While the development team behind PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds don't explicitly use the term "region-locking", the Steam update posted today explains that it is thinking about "operating servers so that only those players who reside in that region can connect and play" while these very same servers are going to be "made invisible to players residing in other regions." Interestingly enough, the post then goes on to state, "But, at the same time, if a player in an exclusive server region forms a team with a player from another region, they can connect to and play on any of the servers available to either of them."

There's no telling exactly when this change will come about in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Until then, though, the development team will be refining the methods to "improve network issues and help with linguistic barriers" in order to ensure stability once the feature is potentially rolled out publicly in the future, and build on the "great results" of its ping-based matchmaking system. To be specific, the post declares, "We are going to run a limited test of this approach as more detailed research and analysis should come before global application." Once this aspect has been thoroughly vetted, fans will surely then see it applied to PUBG's live servers.

All things considered, the team behind PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has remained diligent in the past when it comes to detecting and dealing with cheaters, as PUBG Corp. has tried various tactics in order to deter such unfair playing, with one result being more than one million cheaters getting a ban so far. While it remains to be seen whether or not region-locking will provide a better experience for everyone down the road, as Greene himself has stated that cheaters often use VPNs to bypass the method, hopefully PUBG Corp. will find a viable solution in the long run.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is available now for Android and iOS devices, PC, and is in early access on Xbox One.

Source: Steam