PUBG Mobile players struggling to survive the grand battle royale have a new problem to worry about. Crafty players using emulation and computer mouse and keyboard are playing the game, facing down other players with a massive advantage.
Motherboard reports that a subset of PUBG Mobile players are using devices such as Chromecast or emulators to pair bluetooth devices with their game client and use mouse and keyboard controls.
As other players make due with passable but slightly slower mobile controls, these more accurate players dominate the opposition.
The most common method is with an easy-to-use Android emulator called Bluestacks. Bluestacks allows players to assign keyboard shortcuts to the various on-screen buttons that are normally used to play PUBG Mobile. Once this is done, everything works like the original game rather than a mobile port.
PUBG Mobile already drew some criticism for the apparent inclusion of bots that fill out matches with easy-to-kill fodder.
Players picking up the game for the first time boasted of easy victories only to learn their victories might have been made much easier thanks to the number of bots. With an influx of mouse and keyboard users to the game, the opposite issue might happen – players using their phone might be doomed to lose.
“Holy shit, they’re gonna think I’m cheating,” one YouTuber using a mouse and keyboard said as he recorded gameplay. “I’m gonna get reported for hacking and shit.”
“Won 5 games and realised that very soon once the process for doing that [using mouse and keyboard] is commonplace that all mobile will be filled with people doing it.” a commentator said on Reddit.
The situation resembles an issue that Fortnite Battle Royale currently faces on consoles, where it is possible to use peripheral mouse and keyboards for precision movement. Popular YouTubers like jackfrags have attempted to raise awareness, showing off how easy it is to use special tools and dominate matches.
PUBG Mobile is a surprisingly solid port of the popular battle royale game, but between braindead bots and highly accurate mouse and keyboard users, it might soon become an experience where “normal” players are hardly the norm.
Comments
18 responses to “Mouse And Keyboard Users Are Dominating PUBG Mobile”
Surely they anticipated this?
Surely they could add in a seperate matchmaking queue for “Touchscreen only” like the queues for First Person only?
and just force everyone to use the touchscreen and not accept outside inputs.
There’s no real way to check. The mouse/keyboard fake onscreen touches to map inputs.
Please explain how a chromecast allows you to use a mouse and keyboard on your mobile game?
From the source article:
I don’t understand how that would not lag horribly but OK.
It’s XIM4 all over again.
Anyway, guessing this issue is limited to Android’s open system?
Is there no way to check if an emulator is used? Different user agents or something that can’t be fudged?
Nope. Emulators show up as genuine android devices. When I use BlueStacks it shows up in my history as a Samsung Galaxy on Google.
Why would you bother though, going through all that to play PUBG with a mouse & keyboard just play the PC version wowsers.
One is free, the other isn’t. One needs a high spec machine to play properly, one doesn’t.
Yeah fair point.
Medium spec 🙂
I did say play properly. it’s not the most well optimised game – my i7 1060 struggles with it sometimes even on 1080p
When you could access the PC settings menu from the console version… I expect no less.
I mean…usb hub port and/or otg cable lets you use mouse/keyboard on your phone anyway?
I don’t really see a problem here. All this means is that people need to get a PC so they can play games properly. 😛
“make due”
Make do, not due.
If you play keyboard and mouse you get put into emulator lobbies. Please do better research next time. Also emulators are encouraged by tencent. On their fucking reddit page there is a user flair called emulator.