In terms of volume of reports that I’m seeing personally, and others on the Community Team, we haven’t seen this many for a very long time. We understand there is a big uptake in the number of cheaters you’re playing against and we know how severe the impact is on your matches right now. This is something we’ve been actively following-up with the anti-cheat team and global community team to make sure they understand how severe this issue is within the community.

One of the major concerns pointed out by the community is players with extremely unrealistic stats often not being banned quickly, or even upwards of multiple weeks. This is a concern we’ve raised with the anti-cheat team. I don’t have an answer to provide right now other than – yes, this is an issue and we’re aware it’s a serious one.

In regard to the player you reported to me, while I can’t investigate each player that is reported to me, I will escalate cases to the anti-cheat team when possible and I did do that in this specific case, as I said I would. Unfortunately, I simply don’t have an update to provide with this one I’m sorry, other than the anti-cheat team is investigating. I have said this a few times before, but I can definitely do a better job responding to threads, but as with everything, it’s a balancing act of managing time for different tasks and in all honesty, I’m just not that great at it. It’s hard to keep up with all the messages that come in across various platforms, I’m working on it!

We do have multiple methods to catch cheaters and I know the anti-cheat team has added multiple new methods over the past few months. We’ve got a team dedicated to solely this, they don’t work on anything else but anti-cheat. We employ a variety of anti-cheat solutions, both internal and external (such as BattlEye). While there are many types of cheats you can counteract, some through detection, some prevention, for the most part - it really is a game of cat and mouse, much like anti-cheat and anti-virus and there is never going to be a perfect solution, although we’re of course working towards better, improved systems to provide a better solution to the ongoing fight vs cheaters.

At the moment, the Community Team is working to collect questions we’ve seen across all platforms that players have regarding anti-cheat team and some of which will be used as the basis for an upcoming dev letter (no ETA – don’t expect this within the next few weeks, especially with the holidays), which will do a much better job of explaining this than me.

With all of that said, what action are we taking against cheaters? We’re often ban over 100k accounts per week. For the week of 8th-14th of December we permanently banned exactly 116,531 accounts. Do we hardware ban any accounts? Yes, we employ HWID bans as well. Unfortunately, we can’t apply HWID bans in many cases and I’m requesting we explain the reasoning behind this in detail, in the upcoming dev letter. We are always working to add new anti-cheat measures. Anti-cheat is always super sensitive, as you don’t want to give the cheaters a heads up on anything which may help their cause but will see what we can do and share as much as we can! My last trip to Korea, I asked if some limitations on HWID bans were related to PC cafes (as this is sometimes suggested by the community) and the answer was no.

Sometimes I see sentiment from players suggesting it’s some sort of ploy from our side to not HWID ban accounts, so cheaters rebuy the game and we make more money – I can assure you, that is not the case. I understand how some players can jump to that conclusion, but if you think about it – it’s not logical, and it’s not what we’re doing. Let me explain - for every cheater, there is another 99 affected players. We have a long-term plan for PUBG, we now have WELL over 500 staff globally (closer to the 1000 mark than the 500) and we are going to support this game for many, many years. One of the most important aspects of the long-term success of PUBG is happy, long-term players and the number one concern from many of those long-term players is cheaters. We want to retain our core players, cheaters are the enemy of our core players. We want cheaters gone too.

Regarding VPN usage, and players with high ping playing on your local servers. We are discussing limiting very high-ping players from each server, but there are challenges. A blanket, hard ping-lock does not work without impacting players who have no other option. We need to come up with a more robust solution to ensure that we improve the experience for players as much as possible, without negatively impacting those who have no other option but to play on servers where they have a higher-ping and also allow for friends to play together across regions. I know some players may be unhappy with that last line in particular, but from all the amazing stories I’ve heard of players connecting with friends across the country, or on another continent through this game, it’d be a shame the small number of players who have that experience not be able to connect with each other anymore.

I know our players don’t find it acceptable it’s taken so long to implement a bulletproof solution. I understand that, I’m not here to offer excuses, but I want to do my best to explain why it isn’t as simple as it may seem.

At the same time, I want to let you know it’s still being discussed internally – we know it’s what you want and we’re working to find a solution.