Over 322,000 cheaters have been banned from playing “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.” Recently, the battle royale title from BlueHole has surpassed the 2 million mark of concurrent players on Steam. It sold 15 million copies since it was officially launched on Early Access. The unprecedented achievement of the game is impressive. However, like any other games today, the game developer has its own share of issues. Aside from the server issues that were raised by players, the battle royale title has also its share of cheaters.
Cheating players
On its official Twitter account BattlEye, a Germany-based third party anti-cheat program working with “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” shared that it has banned more than 322,000 cheaters for the game.
The number continues to increase by the day. In fact, the team revealed that there are between 6,000 and 13,000 cheaters banned on a daily basis. In the past 24 hours, there are 20,000 bans that are handed out. Several weeks ago, game director Brendan Greene shared that there were 150,000 accounts that were banned a month ago. This means that in the last 30 days, the number of accounts banned has drastically doubled.
While these accounts are from all over the world, the anti-cheat program disclosed that the majority of the banned accounts are Chinese players. Recently, there has been an increased number of players in the region, which could very well explain the number of accounts banned. In a report by SteamSpy, BlueHole’s popular battle royale title has a massive player base in China and is actually the most popular game on Steam in the region.
We are currently banning at a rate of 6K-13K per day, nearly 20K within the last 24 hours alone. The vast majority is from China.
— BattlEye (@TheBattlEye) October 13, 2017
Other details
In the coming weeks, a brand new map is scheduled to be released, which might contribute to the game’s popularity and increased players. The game has been plagued by complaints recently when players whined that they were unable to log in to the game.
Others who were successful reported that they would receive an error message half-way through the game and will not be able to connect again.
According to BlueHole, the game is suffering from the issues with its servers. The developer revealed that it has originally designed the game to accommodate 1 million concurrent players.
However, in June, there was an unexpected surge in the number of concurrent users. While the team is in the process of developing a new architecture that could accommodate more concurrent players, the rate of the increase in the number of players overtakes the rate of the development of the new architecture.
“PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” is available now on Early Access via Steam. It is scheduled to launch on Xbox One in the later part of 2017.