What happens in PUBG now is way beyond that. The cheat program owners run their own bots/cheaters with hack with account name referring to the program and the QQ (Chinese social media) account number of the cheaters where players can contact them to buy the hack. Not being able to catch mass of cheaters who sell their code to you can be some extreme case of incompetence. But nothing explains “players” who name their accounts after cheats to exists, especially on the toplist. Nothing – besides being on the take.
Meet this cheater:
Yes, “he” is totally obvious. The Asia and North America toplist is full of them. Since they are kill-helping hacks, the kill rating toplist is the most interesting. I played a game on both region with 0 kills to have an approximation of the playerbase size:
Beside their name and their obscene K/D you can notice very low days played (indicating a bot or professional “player” on a new account). There is no way that some dev couldn’t clean this crap up. I mean if they banned everyone whose name is some variation of “wg” and/or “qun” and a bunch of numbers with 5+ K/D, the false positives would be not only next to zero, but any claims would be laughed off at any forum. I mean for one to be innocent, he had to give a totally unsayable name to his account and be pro out of nowhere. Hell, the toplist could be cleaned manually to deny the cheaters free advertising.
However the most telling sign is that the EU main toplist is clear and even the kill toplist has just one cheatseller spam name:
I doubt if the EU players were saints who don’t cheat. Actually I’m sure that 4/10 are cheaters and 2 other are suspicious. But at least the obvious names are cleared. It’s likely that the EU community is under the supervision of a rare not-corrupted dev (or at least someone who asked too much for cooperation) and he refused to tolerate the obvious cheaters.
Please don’t give me the “they ban in waves” bullshit. That applies to ordinary cheat users who ruin 1-2 games a day for lulz and not to professional cheaters who spam their “services” by their name. The “they ban in waves” means that you don’t use your detection software until it’s very good to avoid cheaters to adapt. But the toplist cheaters need no detection software at all, just an intern. Them being banned wouldn’t give out any info about detection to the cheat developers beside “naming an account to spam cheat program and cheating 10 hours a day with a new account with 10+ K/D to get to the top list is a bad idea”.
Sure, I have no doubt that WG-QUN and the underlying cheat will go away when the outrage will be big enough (like Shroud gets killed by one of them with a 400m UMP headshot) for the top dogs to do something. But until it happens, the cheaters and the devs they corrupted make some money to make up for the lower salaries in the gaming industry.
Well, Gevlon, I am not sure as waht to make out of it. If I understand you correctly PUBG is run by corrupted devs, just like EVE and LoL… While being advertised as a PVP “SHOOTER”, a more efficient way to stay alive and get to the top 10 is to collect medkits and similar items.
Why are you still playing that crap? Many of my friends play it and I have been adamant about not playing it since I first read about your medkit strategy, but it seems to be gettting worse and worse every article you publish about it.
There is no way I am going to spend a single Euro on it! So far, it seems there will soon be a “Don’t play PUBG” page being sticked on…
Still, an interesting article… Have you had a look on FOXHOLE yet? IT lacks most statistics for individual player performance comparison, but this is finally a game that imho bases itself on cooperation…
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@Smite: simple, 2M daily players, 12M sales. This thing is getting really big, meaning big money. It’s not something that Falcon class devs can control. We are talking about serious investors with third party audits and whatnot.
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Reverse engineering is hard and most likely PUBG developers just aren’t competent enough to do it. In time they’ll hire enough people and most likely solve this problem that might need a complete rewrite in some places. Problem here is that PUBG wasn’t made by big competent company. It was made as an indie game and nobody expected it to become so big. And for games like that release fast is far more important than proper developemnt. It’s not likely they could afford it in that time anyway.
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@vv: they can’t afford the time to ban those who get to the top 100 with WG-qun names and inhuman statistics?
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@Gevlon
It’s still Early release. The tail is not going to wag the dog just because there are cheaters in the game at this point. The problem is that someone has been able to figure out how the net code works so as to be able to inject the aiming/hit data into the client response code.
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I think they don’t really know what to do. If developers just ban all of them – then they’ll return just with different names in a week and you may lose your ability to observe how their cheats work. I’ve seen this once but not on such scale.
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I think the most likely scenario IS they are banning in waves, but not to find out more about the cheaters, but to give normal players the time to BUY the cheat, so they can get banned too – which pretty often will result in them rebuying the game. So in the end they tolerate two weeks of a cheater-filled rank list, but since they’re in early access and the leaderboard gets reset every month or two, maybe they assume the damage isn’t that big, and this way they can sell more copies of their game. And just as you analyzed in LoL about elo boosters, the players who are willing to buy a cheating software are most likely the players who also spend the most on loot boxes, as they want shiny items just as they want a shiny kda and their spot on the leaderboard. So IF those buy a new account, they might spend a similar amount of money to get all their t-shirts and hats back.
Maybe I am completely wrong, but that could be an explanation.
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@vv: You’re assuming large companies are capable of “competent development” either. But you are partially correct, people new to game development naively believe their customers “won’t cheat” because they want a “competitive, fair fight.” Imagine their shock when reality slaps them in the face like a wet halibut!
The other side of the coin is it’s quite likely that it’s just more profitable to ban in waves. Look at it from the “whale” perspective… these people are whales. They’re willing to buy a new game every ban cycle. I’m sure someone has compiled the metrics to determine the ban wave frequency that is most profitable. That’s the best explanation for companies like Blizzard, not so much for PUBG.
Is that what PUBG is doing? I doubt it. I rather think they’re just running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Too successful, too fast, don’t know how to handle this brute. Looking at the things that are being exploited client side? It’s a hoot. Where were these people when client side hacks were being figured out? Obviously not paying any attention. There is a way to make the client as difficult to hack as possible, and these guys are not doing it. Now they have a full on assault by cheaters, and probably are in a panic as to what to do.
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@Noguff: the client is always in the hand of the enemy. Any reasonable company designes with this premise. But this post isn’t about that: there is no excuse for not sending a junior GM to look at the toplist every day and ban everyone with a spam name and inhuman stats.
@vv: there will be more than enough cheaters left who aren’t using the cheat obviously.
@Skeddar: so your version is that not individual devs are corrupt but the company.
@Smokeman: it’s waste of time protecting the client. You must design the server in a way to not send any data helping cheating. For example WoT calculate visibility on server side, if you don’t see the tank, it’s not sent to your client. There is no reason to send the position of another player in PUBG until he is in your line of sight.
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@Smokeman: it’s waste of time protecting the client.
That’s absolutely right. In the beginning, it was all about “protecting the client”, but those schemes were doomed to fail. And they were hilarious. A LOT of wasted effort, there.
If the client doesn’t need data, YOU DON’T SEND IT TO IT! That’s what I meant by “It’s a hoot.” You also don’t send information BACK from the client except in relative terms. And anything you do send back goes under a microscope before it’s used.
The problem is that it’s just easier to design a client centric game. It’s the lazy way, it’s the wrong way, and it will have you running around like chickens with your head cut off when it inevitably goes pear shaped.
I could have worded that better earlier, the way to make the client less hackable is to make it a client, not the game. A “Client” should be as close to a dumb terminal as possible.
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“@Skeddar: so your version is that not individual devs are corrupt but the company.”
I guess that depends on the definition of corrupt. According to my version they want to maximise their profit while not breaking any rules. At least I don’t think any company is forced to ban cheaters. They just have to wait one week longer to ban them and might earn more money than they lose because of frustrated players.
I think at the moment they introduced mini-transactions with these loot crates they decided that maybe earning money is worth having some outraged players.
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First of all, the fact that none of the bots is older than a week old implies they *are* catching/banning them at least once a week.
Secondly, paying someone to drop everything and check the leaderboard for obvious bots multiple times per day (since they seem to shoot to the top pretty fast) seems like a poor use of resources for a game that still has critical stability issues and other major development hurdles to be overcome before it is even officially launched as a “finished product”…
If the leaderboard is still full of painfully obvious bots up to a week old *after* they launch – then I’d agree it is a serious issue and a sign of either gross incompetence + apathy or corruption…
But in “early access” I think one can forgive them for simply not caring enough to hire a full time staff member to police it constantly, and instead clearing it out once per week.
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@Randomus: the game is buy to play. Assuming that the cheater rebuys the game (likely, since they bought the spamname accounts on purpose), every caught cheater is $30. If the junior staffer catches 30 cheaters a day, that’s $320K profit a year.
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@Gevlon
So you think that inactivity on banning the bots, on the developers part, is tantamount to corruption, yet it is ok for the developer to “extort” gamers by saying “you were caught cheating, but if you pay me another $30 dollars, I’ll let you play my game again”? Do you not see how this contributes to, and demeans the whole gaming culture? There used to be a belief that gamers used to adhere to, in that “It’s only cheating if the system doesn’t allow it”. So why does the system allow it? Lazy development/programming on the developers part?
Developers can ban at many levels. You can have an IP ban, an account ban, they can “console ban” your console via MAC address and turn it into a useless brick, requiring you to spend another $300+ on another console and start cheating all over again. But how high up the culpability chain do you go with this? Someone’s real name, SSN??? Where does it end?
Right now it ends with a system that takes advantage of gamers wallets because the entire gaming culture has been sent mixed signals on what is okay. You can pay money to get Gold Ammo, and pwn noobs, and that’s completely okay! But, god forbid you pay money for a program that gives the same kind of advantage on someone else’s playground.
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@Noguff: the developer bans to remove the cheating account. There is nothing he can do to prevent the cheater from buying another. IP bans work on little punks, not professional cheaters who have all the tools to mask their IP or even the MAC address.
I DO think that the ideal solution would be that one has to prove his identity to some third party anti-cheating firm by physically walking into its office and then he can log into games with this universal third party ID. If any company can prove to this authenticator that he cheated, then his person should be banned from ALL gaming.
Gold ammo is powerful, but not all-powerful. It gives a serious advantage on head-on 1v1. It doesn’t help from being outflanked and shot in the side. PUBG cheats headshots anyone in line of sight, even from large distances in visual cover. You cannot win against such cheater, that’s why they have 30+ K/D
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@Gevlon
“Gold ammo is powerful, but not all-powerful. It gives a serious advantage on head-on 1v1. It doesn’t help from being outflanked and shot in the side. PUBG cheats headshots anyone in line of sight, even from large distances in visual cover. You cannot win against such cheater, that’s why they have 30+ K/D.”
This is exactly my point. Are you really going to argue from a “level of advantage point” when the developer actively sells access to the advantage in the case of Gold Ammo, and then counter with “You cannot win against such cheater” when you could just as easily buy the Aimbot the same as you could buy Gold Ammo? Or does this fall back onto the logic that developers don’t want Aimbots to be used in their games, even though many of them use the most laughable, client-side programming that bots have been taking advantage of for years now?
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@NoGuff: it’s somewhat unfair. PUBG has no gold ammo or any other official pay-to-win. you can’t blame them for the P2W of other studios.
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