The era of the door-to-door salesman might be over, but purveyors of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds cheats are happy to bring their wares directly to you for a personal demonstration. Which occasionally involves owning the crap out of you.
Players selling PUBG cheats and hacks have popped up in the game itself in recent months, demonstrating their products. For example, here is a speedhacker outrunning somebody’s car in an attempt to sell them a cheat, courtesy of Magpie Kingdom:
According to Magpie Kingdom, the cheater’s pitch translates to: “Hi friend, are you in a rush? No problem, you keep driving and hear me out. Do you want this brand new mod that I am using? It is on sale right now. Let me demonstrate. I can go faster than your car!”
Other cheaters have taken to using popular PUBG players’ streams as avenues for advertisement. Here’s Ninja getting obliterated by “Divine Cheats”:
And here’s CyanidePlaysGames telling off a cheater for trying to make a sale during his stream:
“I don’t think you understand what fun is, for one,” Cyanide said in response to the advertiser. “Two, go fuck yourself.”
Cheat sellers aren’t just giving roadside demonstrations of their godlike powers, either. They have also taken to putting cheat-selling information in their usernames, with the letters “QUN” pointing to a popular Chinese social media channel and implying that people should message them if they want to buy cheats. Last month, quite a few of these users made it to the top of the game’s leaderboards:
Image credit: Rgd.
I took a look at the leaderboards today, however, and they seem to be free of accounts advertising cheats.
Now, it should be noted that not everybody with “QUN” in their handle is selling cheats. Some people just like to consolidate their online identities. Seeing “WG”, or “Wai Gua”, in somebody’s name is the real tell, as it’s a Chinese phrase that can be used to refer to external cheat programs. Still, while some players are clamouring for PUBG‘s developers to just ban everybody with references to Chinese social media in their handles, that obviously isn’t a viable solution, because some people would get unjustly banned as a result.
In a recent news post, the PUBG development team said they’re working on “new tools” and will take “stronger actions” in the fight against cheaters, which many irate players consider to be the game’s biggest problem right now. Already, they have banned hundreds of thousands of players for cheating, but the game’s forums, Steam reviews and subreddit are still full of cheat-related complaints. PUBG‘s developers admitted that exiling cheaters from the island is going to be a process: “Our battle against cheaters will not end overnight.”
Comments
4 responses to “Battlegrounds Cheat Makers Are Advertising Their Hacks In-Game”
Anyone fed up with them ruining the Oceanic server should give the SEA servers a try. I’ve been playing on them for a few days now and haven’t encountered a single aimbot or speedhacker, which is a nice change from nearly every Oceanic game being infested with them.
Sadly it’s a common story with every online game these days. It’s too easy for people to create and sell cheats so we have an abundance of them everywhere.
The companies who deal with cheats the best tend to be those that are well developed with a lot of resources and a number of titles under their belt where they’ve progressively tackled cheating. PUBG doesn’t fit this category and subsequently are losing pretty badly right now. Also take into account how rapidly this “early access” game has exploded and the devs have no chance of keeping up.
That said, plenty of more established games have never dealt with cheating adequately. CS:GO still has hackers everywhere…I bought that game and played it until the point when I hit competitive matches and gave up. There were hackers in literally every game, no point trying to play it. I don’t understand how people spend so many hours on it with hacking that rampant.
One of the best companies I can point to for tackling hackers is Blizzard. WoW still has hackers and bots etc but this year alone they’ve decimated the bot population and forced at least one cheat company to stop selling cheats for WoW. I’m surprised that story didn’t turn up on Kotaku actually – it went down quite well on reddit.
I haven’t kept up with how they’re going with Overwatch (I don’t own it) but what I last heard sounded like they were tackling cheats head on and having some success. Correct me if I’m wrong there.
The only ones scummier that those selling cheats are those buying them.
I don’t get people that want to cheat in a game. Doesn’t it just ruin the fun? Play the game and if you suck, get better and then you have a real sense of accomplishment.
It’s the instant gratification economy. Pay to win. I hold the same view of companies like bungie forcing people to spend money for items. I should be able to earn them.