Hello Survivors!

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS is going free-to-play on January 12, 2022! While this is certainly an exciting time, we know that there are often important questions that pop up with such a transition. Namely, how will we address cheaters in a free-to-play game?

Anti-cheat is always a critical priority, but with Free-to-Play incoming, the need for an effective anti-cheat system is more important than ever as banned accounts can easily and infinitely be replaced.

To that end, we’ve been quietly, yet fiercely, preparing a number of countermeasures to combat cheat programs. That said, anti-cheat is always a never-ending fight and nothing we or anyone can do will ever completely stomp out cheating in competitive online games..

In this Dev Letter, we’re going to dive in and talk more about what we’ve been building in 2021, how our anti-cheat situation is looking today, and what we have in store for the future.

WHAT WE’VE BEEN DOING IN 2021

We’ve broken down our 2021 efforts into four categories that we’ll go into more depth on:

  1. Anti-Cheat Solution Improvements
  2. Hardware Ban Improvements
  3. Game Client Vulnerabilities
  4. In-Game Abuse Reinforcements

ANTI-CHEAT SOLUTION IMPROVEMENTS: ZAKYNTHOS

Zakynthos is our proprietary anti-cheat solution that we implemented in January of 2021 as a means to speed up the anti-cheat process. Where before we had to rely on slower external solutions, the time saved with Zakynthos helped us remove an additional 28% of cheaters from the previous year.

Before we talk about what the future holds for Zakynthos and anti-cheat, let’s take a moment to talk about how we go about tackling cheat programs. When we discover a new cheat program, we secure and reverse engineer said program to get a full, deep analysis of what it does and how it bypasses our security. Once our tests lead us to a countermeasure, we develop detection logic into our anti-cheat solutions. Stability tests and other steps then help to ensure these updates don’t compromise the overall integrity of the game.

Even with all of the above, cheat developers are tenacious and will learn how to bypass our anti-cheat solutions’ radars after a time, meaning we always need to be adjusting and improving those solutions in an effort to keep up. Here’s a bit of what we will be implementing in 2022:

  • Automatic analysis of cheat software based on machine learning techniques
  • 24-hour monitoring of Ranked matches in upper ranks
  • Implementation of kernel drivers
  • Preventing tampering of client
  • Hardware ban system improvements

HARDWARE BAN IMPROVEMENTS: KEEPING CHEATERS OUT

Collecting cheaters’ hardware information and dishing out hardware bans has been something we’ve been doing for some time now. While it is quite effective, every software has its flaws and some dedicated cheaters were able to find ways to circumvent such sanctions on their hardware.

There is also the never-ending struggle of issuing swift and decisive bans while avoiding any false-positives that an operation of this scale is sure to stumble upon.

To help solve these issues, we’ve developed a new hardware ban technology that utilizes special algorithms, which we implemented into Zakynthos. This upgrade eventually resulted in  a near 30% decrease in metrics that track players experiencing and reporting cheaters. The new hardware ban also prevented penalized players from circumventing their bans, which subsequently helped us hold the line in terms of anti-cheat metrics.

GAME CLIENT VULNERABILITIES

In 2021, we also focused on dealing with cheats that took advantage of vulnerabilities in our client.

First, to counter speed hacks and flying cars, we made changes so that speed and air time for character and vehicle movement were cross-checked by the server. However, for gameplay aspects where responsiveness is key, having the server cross-check everything could result in sluggish character movement and vehicle control for everyone.

Therefore, we analyzed the play patterns of cheaters, and we were able to apply server-side cross-checks and other defense mechanisms to select accounts only. As a result, the number of players using cheat programs related to character and vehicle movement was reduced by an astounding 99.97%!

Next, we worked on countering cheats that allow players to score kills from absurd distances or that automatically set your crosshair on opponents (or Aimbots, as most would call them). As these types of cheats are especially detrimental to players’ willingness to continue playing, we worked very closely with content development teams to add various validations and defense mechanisms regarding weapon firing, as well as reinforcing Zakynthos to better prevent cheaters from tampering with our client.

IN-GAME ABUSE REINFORCEMENTS

As more and more accounts were banned due to our increased anti-cheat efforts, cheaters looked more and more towards acquiring replacement accounts. As demand for Ranked-ready accounts increased, cases of accounts earning Survival Mastery XP in abnormal ways became more prevalent as well.

Also, in high-tier Ranked, we’ve seen an unfortunate increase in players who constantly team with cheaters to get an unfair advantage towards gaining their RP (Rank Points).

Fighting off cheat programs is very important, but we feel that enforcing these abuse cases are also important in providing a fair gameplay environment. By implementing machine-learning techniques and analyzing abuse cases, we’ve been doubling down on penalizing players engaging in malicious behavior.

As a result of our efforts, the number of players gaining Survival Mastery XP in abnormal ways has decreased by approximately 30%, and the number of players gaining RP through wrongful methods in high-tier Ranked has decreased by approximately 50%. As improvements are made and players learn they can no longer get away with cheating, these numbers continue to decrease.

CURRENT ANTI-CHEAT STATUS

Here on the anti-cheat team, we refer to various metrics to assess the game’s overall anti-cheat status. We first take a look at how many suspected cheater accounts there are out of our monthly player count, as this metric gives an intuitive sense of our overall anti-cheat status.

By delivering on the anti-cheat goals we had for this year, the ratio for suspected cheater accounts has gone down by approximately 45% compared to early 2021, and the situation is continually improving. Our work on patching up client vulnerabilities has continually dropped the average kill count per session for cheaters, a clear sign that the effect cheaters have on our service is decreasing.

Even when comparing the number of permanent bans with last year’s, the number has gone down by approximately 47%. Judging by the fact that the ratio of suspected cheaters to monthly traffic has decreased and is staying at similar levels, we can see this as a sign that the number of cheat program users has significantly decreased as well.