PUBG is my favorite of 2017, with over 250 hours played, but the cheating situation has spiraled out of control. Cheaters using aimbots and speed hacks are shitty, but like Will said on this week's podcast, can be defeated with an experienced team. But this weekend I countered cheaters hip firing through walls and hills half way across the map. I went to twitter to see if others were having similar trouble, and sure enough, wall hacking was a common issue this weekend.

PUBG is a weird and wonderful watershed moment for the fps genre like Quake, CS and CoD4, but it's undoing is a cheating problem unlike anything I have ever seen in a fps. A game that can provide a similar experience and a protected game client will take the mantle from PUBG.

I have a few top 5 rounds today only to be ended with a cheater. It is way too obvious in the kill cams too.

Here's a neat video I found on twitter earlier

I've probably seen something ranging from incredibly suspect to blatant (like the video above) in one out of every 10-15 matches I've played over the last few weeks.

Yeah, I recently started playing again and had had my game ended by cheaters also. One of them jumped off the top of a building and took no damage, then killed my squadmate. He then instantly spun around and headshot me.

Another game I got the drop on someone, shot them a bunch and then they killed me. On the kill cam they had no health left. It's so incredibly frustrating to have a match you've invested so much time in come to an end like that. Cheaters are going to completely ruin this game if the problem isn't fixed somehow.

My first game playing after the full release update the person that killed me did a complete random 180 and got a headshot with the Kar. It wasn't even like a "maybe they heard me" thing, I was prone in a bush about 100m away, and it was a shot from the hip too, not even trying to attempt to look legitimate.

120 hours played and still never seen a cheater. Played a bunch (including one win) over the weekend too.

I've not encountered any cheaters that I'm aware of yet (I'm too low tier), but it sucks that it is becoming such a big problem. Hopefully they work out a reasonable enough solution to somewhat police it. Must be very difficult with the unexpected way that the player numbers have taken off.

Keep playing and ranking up, you WILL encounter cheaters, I promise you. Every single person I play with has encountered numerous cheaters, the higher ranked you are the more you will see.

It's a problem.

Just encountered my first cheater last night. It was my first game for the night and I was so defeated by it I just stopped playing.

This is definitely a marketing strategy where they want you to buy a XboneX and a bad port of this game.

Also it's the reason i stopped playing after only 10 hours into it. If they cant fix this are wont take the time to at least knowledge that this is a major problem they need to fix. I won't be wasting anymore time and money into it. And this Bullshit has being going on since release.

Or, if I play terribly so I don't get matched with better people I guess I can continue to avoid them?

EDIT: Do they expose your rank anywhere? I'd be curious to compare with people who are seeing a lot of cheaters.

@bollard: There are leaderboards you can check in-game.

@bollard: you can check it on sites like this.

I think it depends a lot on what server you're on. Apparently a lot of the Chinese players go to US servers for the ping advantage. I play mostly on AS and before 1.0 I was ranked in the top 650 players in Squads, we'd see a cheater maybe 1 in every 5 or 6 games, but it was at a level where you still had a chance if you could get a couple of good teamshots in or knock them out of a vehicle or something.

The cheats now look like they're impossible to even attempt a counter, though.

@sweep: @mike: Thanks! What Sweep said could totally explain it too, we only ever play EU (according to that site I'm top 20% EU, but it only has my 2018 stats).

You're right that those cheats look completely busted now though.

Far too much is client side. The server doesn't seem to make checks to see if someone was actually hit. It will trust the client. Same with timers on healing where you see people instantly heal up. PUBG has some serious problems. This can hurt people who aren't even cheating. Lag advantage is a problem because of this. You may hide behind a wall for cover as you're being shot and think you're perfectly safe but the enemy is lagging and for them you are not yet behind the wall and able to be killed. You may throw a smoke grenade and sit in it for cover but you can't be sure if you're in the smoke on everyone else's client making smoke grenades useless as anything but a distraction.

All of this should make PUBG damn near unplayable for me but it's too much fun. It's just all very unfortunate and a difficult fix as you're asking a lot out of the servers.

@ajamafalous: That makes me at the same time bewildered as to why someone would want to do that and angry they had the gall to stream it. Pardon my language, but kindly fuck off with that stuff.

I hope all the cheaters rank up so much that they only get to play against each other.

It has been drastic ups and downs for me. The group I play with and myself saw a decent amount (maybe 4 or 5 in total) in the first half of November, and then almost nothing. Then about two weeks ago we hit a period where we literally had about 4 or 5 games in a row in a single day where we got taken out by blatant cheaters.

It's honestly a big turn off with the game. Outside of custom server hijinks on older games, I rarely have experienced cheating this bad before. I really hope they sort this shit out.

I really, really enjoy Will Smith's PUBG streams in the evening but it's gotten so he and his squad spend so much time complaining about cheaters that I can't stand to watch anymore. I think Smurfing is a terrible practice but I kind of wish he'd do it to drop down to a tier where there aren't as many players cheating. This problem sucks.

I'm not ranked very high, but there were a few times that I played since 1.0 that I reported because of weird circumstances when I watched my killcam. The most egregious was the person who killed me with a tommy gun from over 100m with 100% accuracy without a vertical foregrip while I was running left to right. The reticle literally never once bounced up, something that is impossible for the smg with the most recoil. In my experience it's the terrible lag during early access and then the rubber banding at 1.0 that pushed me away twice now. Combine the lag with what @dinosaurs mentioned about low ping players having an advantage and I can't see this game holding things together without substantial immediate fixes. These things combined with cheating at higher rank play could also kill upper level play which puts a damper on PUBG Corps. hopes of making this a worthwhile competitive or Esports ready game.

For all intents and purposes this game is still early access and will likely be this way in the foreseeable future.

I've heard that the game is drastically less cheat-y in first person than third person, but that doesn't really help the people who prefer to play in third-person. There are certain community members who get real high-falutin' when people dare to complain about cheating and hacks because they're not playing it the "real" way, which seems to be blaming the messenger more than anything helpful.

Prior to 1.0 it got to the point where I had to put the game down for awhile because where I was ranked resulted in multiple cheaters in every game. I came back for 1.0 and have basically played nothing but FPP and have encountered far less than before. I haven't played in over a week though, so it could've gone bad again.

It's a problem with the games popularity and also how they dole out items that you can sell on the steam market. First it was idling to gain BP, they fixed that so now people who want that BP to make real money are cheating because that's the best way to get fast BP now.

The only real hope here is it subsides when Tencent takes over publishing rights that they may end up shifting Chinese traffic to a different service away from Steam.

@themanwithnoplan: That video is a recording of a replay, so it's more likely that it's somebody who was killed by that person and watched the deathcam, and then decided to record/upload the replay because of how blatant it is. You can easily find videos on youtube of people hacking (to advertise in the description for the websites on which they sell the hacks), though.

Also, just to clarify on what some people here are speculating: I have exclusively played FPP since they added it to the test servers, and frequently see some of the European streamers that I watch also having their squads wiped by hipfiring full auto from 150 meters, so it's not just one mode or region. I'm sure there's some amount of disparity in frequency (probably also impacted by rating), but none of them are without it.

@ajamafalous: Oh gosh, I can't believe I didn't catch that was a kill cam. I kinda forgot those were a thing now in Pubg.

I've recently been encountering it more as well. The aimbots are real. People aren't even being coy about it. I've even ran into people who are obviously using lag to an advantage. Why people outside of the US servers are able to connect to a US server, without having a US party leader, is beyond me.

Time for Misinfo Wars: After selling so many copies of the game, Blue Hole is selling the cheats back to the PUBG community to double dip on its player base.

I really cannot comprehend the mind of a cheater. Cheating in a game like this makes absolutely 0 sense. Somebody thinks that it is fun? There is no challenge, so how can it be fun? Those guys in that video look bored just running across the map shooting. Oh, you can make money doing it? Then the game is fundamentally broken. This is how paid for loot in any multiplayer game breaks the game. I used to play a ton of multiplayer and cheating is the main reason I stopped. The blatant selfishness of many humans makes me depressed.

@rorie: Now that you have said that Rorie, I split my time between FPP and TPP, and I have never seen a cheater in FPP.

I'm not sure that means much, first person is all I have played since it was introduced and I've seen plenty of cheaters.

@mike: No I know it doesn't mean anything. I just found it strange that I haven't seen one in FPP.

Only ran into my first 'What the..? How did..?" the other day and I have been playing since mid early access. It seemed suss but I didn't report it because the kill-cam was a bit janky and skipping a few animation frames here and there. After the fact I went back into the match replay viewed the encounter again and yep, they didn't stop or turn and still head-shotted me from the hip.

I'm thinking Replay needs to have a tag & report players function.

EU seems to be no so bad on the cheating front

I wonder if the problem is exacerbated somewhat by the lootbox system. Ostensibly the cost of entry should put off some repeat offenders, but if they're able to rack up a ton of points quickly and buy boxes that they can then sell on, they might make a decent chunk of that change back before they're caught. I've certainly heard mention that some of the cheaters are there to grind out currency/boxes.

@y2ken: From what I understand, that is definitely one of the things driving the amount of accounts running cheats in China.

Say what you will about EA, the way Blue Hole has handled the cheating situation is as scummy as anything in recent memory. The fact they went and 1.0'd a game they knew had massive underlying coding flaws is crazy, and the fact they haven't gotten called out as much because they're not a big name publisher is even more disgusting. It's even more the reason I 100% agreed with Peter Brown and Gamespot's approach to handling the game.

I think most cheaters are in TPP servers, or maybe mostly in squads or solos. I mainly play FPP duo and hover in the top 1-2% on leaderboard and have encountered a cheater once in 200 hours, with that one instance only coming in the 10 hours or so i've played since 1.0.

@y2ken: You can VPN buy PUBG for as little as like $8 so earning back through crates being a problem is a non-factor.

The first game I watched Will Smith play, yesterday, he died from someone iron sight blind firing him through wheat, while he wasn't showing at all, before or during, giving that player the win. That player had three games under his belt.

That this is becoming a trend doesn't surprise me to be honest. I realize this is an unpopular stance to take but these are the type of games that sort of thrive on negativity. Some people play this game to feel the sensation of really fucking up someone's shit amidst the chaos and screwing them over in sneaky ways that are undeniably euphoric. Hiding in a house hoping to ambush a looter, camping an air drop for some easy kills, sniping people who have no scope to fight back with. It's encouraging players to essentially troll the hell out of each other to maximize their chances of winning in this MMO death match.

It was only a matter of time before some people just don't get the kind of rush from standard tactics and resort to fighting the entire game on a coding level just to win and ruin things for everyone. That way they're more likely to be fighting all the players on a server and not simply the dozen or so you might engage with in a solo run. And because it's so popular they're probably extra stoked to get called on it in video clips and stream archives. I personally don't condone that stuff and would hope that in the long run Bluehole puts their money (however many millions the game made) where their mouths are and find a solution. At least give hackers a special win quote: cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater. I just hope the conversation stays strong on "Screw hackers for ruining the game," and doesn't turn into "Because it's PUBG, the cheating is very interesting." Imagine if video game pundits suddenly start saying, "I finally ate my first pumpkin last night in Battlegrounds."

#GOTY (sorry, I had to)

The cheater issue isn't shocking to be honest. Something like 60% of PUBG's players are Chinese (which explains why you see such a gulf between current and peak player counts for this game vs. any other in the top 10 on steam). The marketplace for items in this game is so out of hand that Chinese players can actually make a living just playing this game all day; it just comes down to winning games and racking up points for boxes. When you consider what kind of money the lower and middle classes in China would make from actually working...well this starts to make a lot of sense. Obviously hacking is the best way to win games and get boxes. I think Player Unknown has also confirmed that the vast majority of cheaters are from China, so the amount of cheating is certainly disproportionate to what proportion of the player base Chinese players make up.

Seriously though, Butthole games isn't exactly a proven developer, and this game is popular because of it's concept and timing in the market. The actual technical competency of this game is almost bottom of the barrel. I'm waiting for a talented developer to come along and make a better battle royale game so that I can actually play something that runs, looks, sounds, and feels like it's made by a developer swimming in the kind of money that Butthole games is.

I uninstalled it until they get it sorted. If I want the experience I'll try Fortnite

I'm playing on Asia FPP squads and i'm currently ranked in the top 0.076% of players. We see cheaters maybe one game in three, but even then there's a decent chance we can still kill them as long as they're not invincible or shooting through the terrain, which is very satisfying. A lot of the cheaters clearly have no idea how the game works and are only farming to rack up battlepoints and sell things on the marketplace, and that means if you're careful and rotate/push carefully you can take advantage of their mistakes.

How fucking crazy is it that the meta-game is now ways to counter aimbot, though? That fucking sucks.

There's definitely a wide variety of cheats in play at the moment. i've been playing a lot on PC the past week or 2 and every game it seems like i notice on cheater. One last night was so blatantly obvious he shot me from over 100m away through a tree, rapid firing an m14 without ads'ing and had no scope attachment. The shot went through tree foliage which should've obscured his line of sight and hit me directly in the head while i was prone on top of a hill that he already would've barely had line of sight to. Prior to that, he was firing at me through walls in a room with no windows from an even greater distance away.

Most of the other cheaters i see are less obvious but still have hints of BS. Like someone running around and suddenly turning 90 degrees and engaging you immediately from long range screams of wall hacks but i've also see a fair amount of connection manipulations (lag switches) and people programming macros into their devices to convert semi auto weapons to recoiless full auto death machines. i learned that one when i started noticing 1911's being emptied like micro uzi's.

Cheating is definitely the biggest problem in the game right now. I hope they do something about it. I would seriously be interested to see if just region locking the servers would help because there's no reason for people in asia to be solo queueing in the the US unless they're up to no good.

This is a bit of a nightmare how bad the cheating is on it. Lol not that I hold this against the GB crew :P but maybe this game shouldn't have been game of the year haha. Not that they would have known this would happen...

It would be great if Battlefield or some other shooter with good gameplay put their own spin on the mode. I like PUBG (I play on Xbox), but the shooting is awkward as hell. The latest update that allows you to aim with left trigger like a normal shooter rather that toggling the aim mode by tapping LT is helpful, but the actual gunplay is still way behind Battlefield, Rainbow Six, even Ghost Recon. I think there are some cheaters on Xbox too. I've seen a lot of gameplay from the PC version; PUBG being the best game of 2017 and Mass Effect being the worst game of 2017 is laughable to me.

If you think PUBG has a cheating problem try playing CODWW2 on PC, holy shit.
59 hours played and i'd put percentage of matches with a hacker in at 60%.

Ok good I'm glad I'm hearing more of this as a small part of me was feeling guilty about what seemed like using the report button a lot when I got killed.

But sure enough, when I went back to the replay, it's pretty blatant the guy who killed me has a wall hack and knows where people are through terrain/walls. It also became obvious in the replay that they had an aim/shoot bot as I jumped out of a building and the cheater shot like 5-6 times with ironsight sans scopes, all hit me as I was falling near the bottom, and he didn't shoot a round over what was needed to kill me.

I think the new crates have cheaters coming out of the woodworks again.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-16/tencent-cracks-down-on-cheats-in-world-s-top-selling-video-game?

This hasn't affected me personally as I'm not good enough or unlucky enough to run into cheaters often, but you know it's real real bad when the national business media runs with the story.

heck I've never even seen a story about videogame cheating on something like Blpomberg before. It was their #5 story no less.

They are working on a new anti-cheat system...but you can never get rid of cheaters completely...

This is the thing that I keep thinking about too. PUBG still feels like the Arma mods that it shares lineage with. It's a cool concept, 100 people scavenging in a shrinking arena while trying to eliminate the competition. But it all feels so slapdash. They stapled a fantastic idea onto a game design meant for something else, and it doesn't completely fit. There's very little to praise about the actual design of the game, it's just that PUBG is the best execution of a great concept that thrives on chaotic sandbox gameplay. People don't take it seriously, but Mary Kish's criticism of bathroom weenies still rings true as the biggest problem with game's design. Just look at how poorly their attempts at becoming an esport have gone.

They came in and beat H1Z1 because they had a better product, but it still feels like the concept is being executed with the bare minimum of competency required. Big AAA studios have certainly noticed, and are certainly planning their own versions that will have the kind of polish and focused design that PUBG lacks. If they can't compete with AAA studios in terms of polish and quality, they need to make sure they have enough mind share that it will be hard for others to muscle their way into the market.

So if on my death cam, I see the guy in a building, turn towards me and shoot me twice through an entire hill I was behind and below from a couple hundred meters away I can assume he cheated? I'm new to the game but I am having a hard time figuring out how that could have even happened unless the death cam is wildly inaccurate.

@underwhelmed: That sounds like it yeah. That's often what it looks like when somebody is using Wallhack/Aimbot etc.