PUBG Bans Over 1 Million Players For Cheating

As if the past actions of PUBG Corp. haven’t proven the company’s commitment to stop cheating clearly enough, over one million players were recently banned from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for using a tool called ReShade. This is just the latest in a trend of anti-cheat measures being taken by the developers of the game to encourage fair play and real enjoyment.

The one million player ban was announced by the watchdog of PUBG’s servers, Battleye, Tweeting that despite their best efforts, cheating continues to escalate. By the way, those one million players were banned in January alone. That’s just the first month of 2018.

“We have banned over 1,044,000 PUBG cheaters in January alone, unfortunately, things continue to escalate,” the Tweet reads.

As PC Gamer notes, this development follows the developers’ decision to block the Steam family sharing feature as it applies to the game. The developers are also working on a host of anti-cheat tools that will be rolled out over the coming months. In the case of the latter topic, one of the bigger items on the list is the prevention of using third-party tools to manipulate the game’s settings to give players certain advantages.

This happens to include post-processing tools such as ReShade, which is what the one million players were using that led to them getting banned. Now, it’s worth noting that the developers did say in a blog post that these players can still come back to the game once they uninstall any of the tools on the list of blocked software.

"The new anti-cheat feature will block different helper programs that alter the graphics or aid in gameplay in some way," the blog post reads. "What these programs have in common is that they all hook into our game and transform game files. Programs that are not used to gain an unfair advantage can also be blocked if they behave like cheats.

"One of the popular programs that will be blocked is ReShade. You will not be banned for having it on system but you will no longer be able to play PUBG while it is installed. Please uninstall ReShade (or any other blocked program) and launch the game again. Some players may find that reinstalling PUBG is also necessary."