The planned anti-cheat update for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been delayed.
Developers for the wildly popular battle royale shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (or PUBG as players prefer to call it) announced via their Twitter feed that the much-anticipated anti-cheat update has been indefinitely delayed.
"PC players,” the post began. “The patch for the anti-cheat update has been delayed, as an unexpected issue has occurred while testing its compatibility. We will soon update you when it will be released. Thank you for your understanding."
There has been no word on what the compatibility issue is or when it will be fixed. No new date for the release has been set.
As PUBG’s popularity grows, so too has the game seen an escalation in cheats and hacks. The developers themselves admit that the bulk of the cheaters have been from China, where PUBG has also seen an enormous swell of new players. The country sees cheating in online games as more acceptable than in Europe and North America, and has a thriving market for hacking and cheating software.
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As a result, PUBG players from around the world have been calling for China to be region locked in order to prevent cheaters from accessing everyone else’s game. With every update on the Steam Community site, users pour into the comments section to request one thing: “Region Lock China.” The words are usually written in giant, obnoxious ASCII fonts and come from multiple users, not just bots.
However, PUBG developers are loath to outright lock China as there are now millions of Chinese players on their servers, all of whom spent money to purchase the game and continue to spend money buying in-game cosmetic items.
PUBG’s preferred solution is to implement anti-cheat software that will detect and ban cheaters, thus preserving the Chinese player base while eliminating the problem. Last week the developers announced an update that would specifically target cheaters with new proprietary software that would primarily focus on players that use other software to modify the game’s files to provide them an unfair advantage.
However, it seems that this new software must be in conflict with something integral to the game, and now the developers are holding back on releasing the update to the live servers.
For now at least, PUBG players will have to endure a game riddled with cheaters for a little while longer.