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Today, PUBG Corp. took to the Steam Community forums to issue an apology over a bug that caused people to lose out on Battle Points, the game’s in-game currency system. While players are to be compensated for their loss, it seems that the more pressing issue is cheating and region hopping, prompting many to call for region locks on servers.
It’s fair to say that developer PUBG Corp and publisher Bluehole have remained relatively in touch with its fan base and respective concerns, quelling bugs and issues as they come. The Battle Point bug that occurred from December 20th, the titles full PC release, up until December 27th is no exception.
“We are compensating you for this loss. BP is given out to users all around the world, so it might not be received right away after clicking on the popup informing you about your BP compensation. Please be patient, you will get your compensation,” stated the post. Players have until February 9th to make the claim, otherwise they will miss out on the compensation regardless of clicking on the pop-up.
Of course, this begins to feel like a typical “are you entitled to compensation?” advert despite the companies’ best intentions, but the real issue lies in the ability to region hop and the current anti-cheat systems.
Currently, players have the ability to switch region on a whim, enabling people to utilise higher ping to their advantage and even cheat on servers which aren’t their own. Despite PUBG Corp/Bluehole apologising for the bug, replies have been littered with angered fans demanding that Chinese servers be region locked due to the majority of cheaters apparently residing there according to PUBG creator, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene in an interview with Kotaku.
While the replies are similarly overcome with typically racial attacks on other countries, specially China, there are voices of reason in the comments calling for the region lock of every region, and some that generally want better anti-cheat systems in place to prevent such rampant chaos ruining their games.
Greene is against the idea of banning an entire country because of the minority cheating, stating that just because “the majority of cheaters come out of China, but that doesn't mean all Chinese players are cheaters. This idea that just because you've got a few bad eggs, you've got to ban a whole country is a bit reactive.” That being said, now that Chinese servers are official, region locking isn’t the equivalent of a ban.
It’s a controversial issue that is incredibly difficult to tackle, but threatens the longevity of the game and therefore will become a priority for Bluehole and PUBG Corp. to fix.
KitGuru Says: While the majority of potential cheating is often debatable and uncertain, I came up against my first indisputable hacker in Rainbow Six Siege just yesterday, and can understand the frustrations that it presents. I can’t imagine coming across that every other game, and would want answers myself. Do you think servers should be region locked? Is there a better way to handle cheaters?
Region locking is a treatment of the symptom, not the cause. Combatting cheating is never a winning battle but one can easily reduce the numbers and make things harder for the modders who create the hacks with continued dedication. Hell, there are plenty of anti-cheat systems that are practically plug-n-play so most of that effort can be outsourced
Surely we could region lock to areas where ping doesn’t go too crazy. Like Oceania can Access the SEA & US servers, but not Asia, Europe or China. Or Europe can access US servers and viceaversa.
Or maybe we just wait for the chinese horde cheating to inevitably die off now they have their own.
“Greene is against the idea of banning an entire country because of the minority cheating, stating that just because “the majority of cheaters come out of China, but that doesn’t mean all Chinese players are cheaters.”
No, they don’t all cheat. but 90% of them don’t speak English so cant communicate with the squad, and when over 50% of games have a chinese hacker, it puts the rest of us off playing. I played about 10 games together, killed by aimbotters in 5 of them.
He needs to drop the “racist to region lock a server” BS. China is on the other side of freaking the planet FFS. You get major lag and high ping if you don’t region lock servers. Most game servers here in the West only has EU or USA servers and that is for a very good reason.
Overwatch has region locking and is popular. Believing that region locking would cause a drop in players is just moronic and a case of another dev/publisher having not done any market research.
Cheating in games will always happen, therefore by introducing things like region locks, it will at least group people with similar mentalities together as some cultures seem to be more inclined to cheating than others e.g. Russia, China.
Take the companies to court that make the cheats. Another dev did this successfully. You have a huge business partner on your side (ms) and have their resources on your side. I would love the region lock to be in force but would that make the hackers just use vpns?, hopefully the anticheat will be improved as at the moment there have been loads of cheats in game. Superjumping, aimbotting and ESPing through the rounds players making it very unfair for legitimate players to play.
It’ll also gate off many communities. I know plenty of groups that are UK/USA mixed even despite the ping, and that’s the extreme example. What is even defined as a region anyway when it comes to game servers? Russia, for example, tends to share the same servers as most of Europe (typically placed strategically in Frankfurt or Stockholm for best coverage). As does Mexico share US servers in some games
Region locking to each country does seem like a good idea not because of the cheating but for the lag that comes with a lot longer distance. I am sure each country has just as many cheaters as the next so you probably won’t get rid of that by region locking but at least the pings should be lower with region locking in place.
The key is how the infrastructure of the internet is set up.
Russia for example has pretty good connections to Europe, but crap ones to China, so lumping Europe and Russia together works relatively well from a ping perspective while lumping Russia and China together would be a nightmare.
Or another example:
India has shitty external connections towards both Europe as well as the far east, so they are going to be pretty isolated as ping to anywhere else would be horrible.
its actually been shown that 99% of cheaters in PUBG are in China. I have been killed by a lot of cheaters, even had one on my team that I ran over on accident :), EVERY SINGLE ONE had a chinese name. It is not racist to recognize cultural differences. I lived in China, I loved it, have Chinese friends, but to them cheating in a videogame isn’t a big deal. It’s just the truth.
Same experience here. I feel like this sentiment has been echoed thousands of times at this point but apparently we’re not getting through since they haven’t acknowledged the language barrier and ping issues. Also, one sour apple does indeed ruin the bunch. Those few cheaters, of which are mostly out of China and are more than just a few, are ruining the game for everyone else.
Cheating is part of Chinese culture. To them, cheating is being cunning.
Really feeling burnt out at 200 hours, I’ll do another round with friends since that’s what everyone is playing but not into it. I’m not going to count off all the reasons pubg is hell but china is numba one on the list.
Just look at ‘their’ newest fifth generation fighter aircraft. They hacked the F35 data from the USA and made it their own. Culture is a top down phenomenon, and the Chinese believe that cheating is fine if it advances whatever cause they believe in. It’s not racism or xenophobia…
I have no issues gaming with anyone provided they don’t cheat. We compete to win based on the merit of our skill for the thing in front of us. The Chinese have shown that they have different cultural standards in that they compete to win based on the merit of their skill for unrelated matters. BH, on the other hand, has shown that their culture is based solely on monetary gains and intentionally conflating xenophobia and cultural incompatibility.
In essence… Most Americans want healthy competition, most Chinese want to eliminate competition, and BH wants to demonize those who recognize the difference so that they can earn some cash. THANKS.
It’s a difficult battle because latency and region would be determined by the location of the VPN connection, and it would mask the client side information. Players who would otherwise be determined to have latency issues would be thought of as players who have “brain delay.” I’m not sure how developers would, or even could solve that problem. The best solution I can think of is forced download pre-check files which have permission to modify your machine, but I don’t see many people going for that.
You’re absolutely correct. If only culture lock were an acceptable solution, but I imagine the PC (that’s political correctness, not person computer) internet police would launch the largest temper tantrum that we’ve ever seen.