100,000 Bans a Week; Popular FPS Battles Cheater Plague
Developers admit that the precautions taken so far have not been enough, although bans have been count in the thousands.
On the blog of PUBG: Battlegrounds on Steam members of KRAFTON have published a report prepared by the Anti-Cheat department. It includes a summary of the fight against cheaters so far and details of the plan to improve it in the future.
Plague of cheaters in PUBG
According to the developers each week in PUBG an average of 60-100 thousand accounts deemed to be using, selling or sharing illegal programs to facilitate gameplay are banned.
All blocked accounts are divided into two categories:
- stolen accounts - according to data analyzed by KRAFTON as many as 85% of accounts banned as of 2022 were created before the game's switch to free-to-play model (January 2022), which is expected to indicate that a large proportion of them may have been taken over and sold by cheaters to subsequent players.
- Accounts preying on the Survival Mastery Level system - some of the illegal sellers were said to have created special "workshops" to allow for extremely fast leveling of newly created accounts using repetitive actions, possible with automatic macros. Such accounts are to be sold later, usually attracting attention with a suspiciously fast reaching of level 80, which enables ranked gameplay.
Despite the surprisingly high number of banned accounts and knowledge of cheater tactics, the developers are aware that it's till easy to encounter in the game. Members of the Anti-Cheat group in PUBG have come to the conclusion that only a systemic change in the approach to the problem has a real chance of preventing it.
Plans to continue the fight against cheaters
Seeing unsatisfactory progress in countering cheating in PUBG the developers decided to abandon their current system (observing repeated behavior patterns, monitoring adherence to rules, responding to other players' reports) in favor of an AI-based model.
The effects of this decision are already expected to be noticeable:
"To improve our countermeasures, the PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS Anti-Cheat team has initiated the development of a machine learning model that can learn the characteristics and abuse patterns of the Mastery Level system.
Using this model, we expanded and refined the criteria for detecting destructive players in May and June this year. As a result, we have seen several positive changes.
The number of bans imposed on potentially threatening accounts has more than tripled compared to the period before the introduction of this model. In addition, the internal process of monitoring players/accounts suspected of being fraudulent showed continued improvement, and the number of monitored account providers decreased. We also observed an increase in the prices of these accounts."
This method proved to be a hit with accounts preying on the Survival Mastery Level system. However, the developers admit that account theft is still a more incalculable and dangerous problem, which they must continue to work hard to solve, also relying on AI learning.
In competitive games, the technologies of developers and cheaters have always been in a perpetual arms race, and will likely remain so. Still, any discovery of a new way to make player experience more pleasant is a step in the right direction.
