PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, was released in July 2016 to large commercial success and overall positive critical ratings. But its player base heavily dropped after the excitement of the game coming out wore off, going from over 3 million players to eventually drop to less than 500,000.
A mobile version was also created, called PUBG Mobile, which had the same issue of a rapidly dropping player base after a lot of hype just after the game’s release. However, while the casual player base dropped heavily, opportunities for professional play thrived. Some tournaments had prize pools of over $200,000.
These opportunities for competition opened all over the world, not just in the main E-sports continents like Europe and North America. However, with these opportunities came many cheaters looking to win some easy prize money.
In PUBG, there are only a few things that can get players in trouble during both professional and casual gameplay. Using third-party cheating software designed to aim, shoot or move for players to make the game easy to win is one. Another action that will get you banned is teaming up with other players. Since PUBG is a battle royale game, it’s meant to be a free-for-all, and when multiple players team up it creates an unfair and unintended advantage for them.
Another infraction is something called ringing, which is playing on another player’s account. This infraction can cause a ban for both the person who shared their account, as well as the person playing on an account that isn’t theirs.
These four forms of unacceptable conduct are currently the only way to get banned unless you try to evade it by making another account, which will get you banned again. All these infractions hold different ban penalties in pro play, blocking a player from competing for a certain amount of time. Most of these penalties last a year, excluding cheating in a competitive match, which will permanently ban you from playing in any tournament ever again.
These rules should be easy to follow for professional players, considering ban time and possible penalties to your team may happen because of cheating, but some players or competitive teams have decided to break the rules. These teams can be found out through any number of means, but when they are caught cheating a ban is guaranteed to follow.
Because of these penalties, it might seem like competitive E-sports teams may not want to cheat because of these penalties, but still find a way to. Out of the many teams who qualified for the PUBG Mobile Club Open Spring Split, an annual PUBG Mobile professional tournament happening in the spring, there were 44 teams disqualified for some form of cheating. Some of them were disqualified because of ringing, others for outright cheating and some for trying to distrustfully bypass the anti-cheating software that catches cheaters.
As of right now, there are 286 players banned with 88 of those players being banned permanently for outright cheating in a competitive game. This just goes to show that the pro scene of PUBG Mobile has a large issue with cheaters, and something needs to be done.
The issue is within the culture of the game. PUBG Mobile is seen often as a game that’s not included in E-Sports because it’s a fringe game, so players looking to get easy money can go and cheat in a tournament. If they get caught, it’s not an issue since the game is so far off the grid, consequences won’t translate to other parts of their careers.
If PUBG Mobile can be seen as a main E-Sport title or get closer to one, these cheaters would more than likely be heavily reduced.
Dylan Shepler can be reached at [email protected]