Is the solution really as simple as region lock, like the vocal majority of the playerbase seems to think?
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has drawn in its fair share of hackers, that much is clear as day. Even since Early Access, reports have been flooding in about players being able to see people through walls, take an inhuman amount of damage, and racking up inhuman killcounts with the help of aimbot programs. And while the dev team behind PUBG is taking steps to counteract these players making the game less enjoyable for the rest of us, cheating is still much more of an issue than most of us would like it to be.
To Bluehole’s credit, the game devs haven’t been inactive on this front. Despite their last anti cheat update effectively breaking their game, they did take the opportunity during the rollback to state that they’re still actively working towards finding a way to block hackers that doesn’t compromise game integrity. They’ve also been successfully utilizing ping-based matchmaking on the live server build for some time now, and that’s drastically cut down on how often players become prey for foreign hackers.
But players seem to be more and more vocal on the matter of “foreign hackers”, with public outcry of “region lock china” all but reaching meme status within the game’s community, even with the steps Bluehole has already taken to ban and punish hackers.
PUBG creator Brendan Green spoke out about the matter in an interview with USGamer, reminding players that “everyone that [suggests] region locking [is forgetting about] VPN” - so it seems as things stand, the dev team won’t be pursuing locking out Chinese players as an option.
The company has remained quiet, however, about any specifics regarding their next steps on the anti-cheat front.
