Competitive Battlegrounds Players Caught In Anti-Cheat Ban Receive Multi-Year Suspensions

One of the most common complaints about PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is that the game is often rife with cheaters, which makes the game harder to play for casual players. As such, developers at PUBG Corp. have vowed to get far more aggressive with cheaters, resulting in a recent ban wave for big and minor cheating programs. One of the most recent ban waves centered around radar hacks, which were incredibly hard to detect, because they involved using a VPN to sniff network packets and get the positions of other players. This usually gave information to to the person using the hack on a different screen, meaning you have to be looking for it to catch someone using it. 

When PUBG Corp. banned a number of players for using the radar hacks, 10 competitive players suddenly disappeared from the game, with VAC bans appearing on their accounts on Steam. Today, the developer announced that these players were confirmed to be using the radar hack, some during professional matches.

"We were able to verify with concrete evidence that no ban was falsely imposed due to a technical or human error," PUBG Corp. wrote. "We also performed a thorough review of the system logs to search for any evidence that would suggest any of the banned accounts had either been hijacked or borrowed by somebody else when an unauthorized program was apparently used. We found no surprise ch evidence."

While the common suspension for hacks is one year, all ten players are getting significantly longer suspensions than normal. The six players who were found to be using the radar hack during professional matches are suspended for three years, while everyone else is getting a two year ban. Additionally, two players who were aware of the cheating but said nothing are getting three year bans, as well.

PUBG Corp. is now taking a zero-tolerance policy towards cheating that involves background checks for multiple accounts and exhaustively checking every competitive player's records in the future.

"However, any player who is not receiving a penalty right now but has a record of an unauthorized program usage in any of their accounts will effectively be blocked from entering any officially recognized PUBG esports competition in the future," they add. "For all upcoming esports competitions, we will make it mandatory for all players to go through a background check on all accounts they own, from which we will uncover any ban records to determine the appropriate esports suspensions."