PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is one of the biggest multiplayer games going right now. But with its wild popularity there also comes people that want to ruin the experience for others. Cheating within the game has risen greatly over the course of the last two months; this week, we continue our chat with Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene to discuss that situation.
“So we have updated some things on the server side to try to break a lot of the ways that they are hacking the game,” Greene said. “A lot of this stuff is malware level hacks which are coming in via the windows kernel and that is very hard for us to detect.”
“We really want to build a more statistic based cheating detection. FairFight have a great system and trying to do that yourself takes an incredible amount of time. We’re committed to getting rid of them and we understand there has been an uptick recently and it’s not something that we aren’t happy with. We want this to be a competitive Esport, so we have to think seriously about security, and we are.”
Rainbow Six: Siege is another game that was having issues with cheating but Ubisoft combatted this by introducing an additional anti-cheat engine alongside its already existing server-side anti-cheat. Rainbow Six: Siege is now running both FairFight and BattlEye to complement each other, and with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds already using BattlEye, Stevivor asked Greene if they had considered also implementing FairFight.
“We talked to FairFight but we haven’t really had the time to do much because we’ve been so focused on the internal 1.0 build, and now the Xbox build as well that we want to focus on getting the game right,” Greene said. “We understand that there is a f*ck ton of cheaters right now. But really it’s about getting the game complete, because we can get rid of the cheaters and that’s not going to be as much of an issue once we have some better systems in place.
“But we want to make sure the game is finished first, if that makes sense. It’s more important for us to get the build polished and stable – and that’s going to play very badly in the press if I just say that. Cheating is a top priority but it’s going to take us time to build these systems, and we don’t want to ban false-positives all the time.”
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is available in early access on Windows PC. It launches on Xbox One on 12 December.
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