It’s starting! If you had October 9^th, 2017 in the office pool of “When will Gevlon fail in PUBG and blame his failure on corrupt devs”, you win. In LoL it took him 1000+ games of being unable to leave the starter league before he rage-quit and blamed others. Seems in PUBG his no-lifer stamina only lasted 600+ games without a single win. Still impressive to pound ones head into a wall for that long, but it wasn’t a LoL-level of failed effort.

Lack of any game design or even basic IT understanding on Gevlon’s part aside (though there is some comedy in him believing search-target bans are so easy, while he also plays a game with a clearly massively broken ‘ranking’ system that does nothing that he isn’t crying about being so easy to fix, wonder why…), the cheating in PUBG is getting comically bad. Now by comically I mean I’ve personally seen it only a couple times, so it’s not like its happening every other game or anything, but yes, it’s not good, especially from the PR perspective of said fake leaderboards.

At the same time, this is what happens in any game that blows up so quickly. Botting and gold selling were completely out of control in WoW at launch, and those same activities happen to a lesser degree in most other MMOs as well. Combine suddenly having one of the most popular games out with a smaller dev team, hacking being so easy and popular in FPS games, and your game using a common engine, and surprise, hacking happens.

The curious thing about the last few days is why the hackers are being so blatant now? To the average player, someone landing a head shot quickly on you from a fair distance isn’t automatically cheating (Shroud consistently lands ‘must be hacking’ shots), so if you run a hack and use it that way, you go undetected from the perspective of other players. That’s not what is happening here though. Players are blatantly speed hacking in full view of others, using clear wall hacks, and abusing the hacks so hard they kill 60+ people in a single game at comical speed (a game will have 10 people remaining while still in the first circle). That’s clearly someone who doesn’t care about the account and being banned, which again, raises the question of ‘why’?

One explanation is that the account owner doesn’t care about the cost of the game, so will abuse a hack as hard as possible for the laughs, and when the ban happens, they don’t care. Another, similar explanation is the hacker is using a stolen CC, so again money isn’t an issue. Considering how ‘visible’ these types of hackers are, even just a dozen or so of them acting this way will get noticed and posted about on Reddit, and since the leaderboards are already comically broken, getting into the top 10 is also very quick and easy for the hackers, which makes their current form of advertising the hacks effective.

So this all makes for some fun drama on Reddit (though currently not a single thread on the front page is about hacking), gives us a few more ‘that’s interesting’ clips to watch, and very rarely actually ruins a round of PUBG for someone. But in terms of overall problems, it’s still way down the list. I’d take performance improvements over this, as I would additional content (guns, maps) or systems like vaulting. Not that with the success of PUBG the team cant’ expand to cover more areas, or that hacking should be fully ignored, but that doesn’t happen overnight, while the next effective hacking tool can spring up at any moment.

As I said above, hacking happens in any popular game, so this is business as usual and shouldn’t be a surprise to most people. And if I had to guess, I’d say the current wave of blatant hacking will stop shortly, only for another form of it to pop up should PUBG remain as popular as it is.