There's never been a competitive game or sport without its fair share of cheaters, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is no exception. Since the game's initial PC launch back in 2017, it has struggled to deal with players prepared to do anything to win. The mobile version of PUBG has been particularly plagued, seeing thousands of players banned daily, most of them from Chinese accounts.

Now Tencent Games, PUBG's Chinese publisher, and PUBG Corp may finally have a solution. The two companies have come together to announce Project Ban Pan, a new method of catching cheaters. In the project's launch video, a real example case is shown of a cheater who was caught making their character invincible with a clever technique.

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The unnamed cheater didn't have a specialized piece of code, like a lot of hackers, or even any kind of software manipulation at all. Instead, they managed to fool the system using two perfectly ordinary mobile devices.

The trick was that the match was started on one phone, and played for the first half. Then, the cheater logged on to PUBG on the second phone, which deceived the game's systems into believing that there'd been a connection issue.

PUBG Battle

As long as the game was being played on the second phone, the cheater was unable to be killed, and could easily rack up a high body-count. Then all they needed to do was switch back to the first phone, thereby resolving the "connection issues," and finish the match victorious. Unfortunately for them, they were caught out by PUBG's new detection systems and slapped with a 10-year ban.

 

According to Tencent, around 95% of violations across all platforms are automatically punished by the game's security systems. The remaining 5% comes from players who've been reported as suspicious by fellow competitors, allowing the company to build a larger software database. This has the dual purpose of exposing new methods that the security systems aren't equipped for, and allowing Tencent to impose offline punishment.

A core aspect of Project Ban Pan that will soon be added to these systems is the Death Replay function, available from March 3rd. This will allow players to see how they were killed from the perspective of their killer, making it easier for them to spot and report foul play.

Tencent says that player reports of cheating have noticeably decreased in recent weeks, following the introduction of the first wave of new anti-cheating methods. Their numbers certainly support this, as currently, the game's security systems flag over 8,000 accounts every day, each being punished with a ban of 10 years.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is available now on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and mobile devices.

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