'PUBG' Hardware Bans Will Begin Soon

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds players who consistently cheat will be hit with hardware bans with the anti-cheat feature coming soon, PUBG Corp. said.

PUBG Corp.'s latest developer letter about the stats of the "FIX PUBG" campaign included a section on anti-cheat measures and confirmed the feature wasn't far away now. Addressing different anti-cheat topics and discussing progress that's been made and what's still to come, PUBG Corp. said the hardware bans would soon be levied against PUBG's more stubborn players.

"We are also finishing preparations for hardware bans to permanently remove stubborn players who refuse to play fair," the FIX PUBG letter said. These bans will begin soon and will target players who continue to cheat on new accounts."

These types of bans are a more severe form of banning problematic players that ban the cheaters' hardware from accessing the game as opposed to simply banning their online accounts. By targeting parts of players' hardware such as their MAC address, the hardware ban tactic should, in theory, prevent recurring cheaters from accessing the game from whatever device that's been banned. There are ways around such bans, but they don't work for everyone and the hassle of having to circumnavigate a hardware ban would likely dissuade many cheaters from pushing their luck.

Hardware bans aren't a new concept in PUBG since they were listed in the initial FIX PUBG announcement as one of the many upcoming features to be added throughout the campaign. The current state of the hardware bans according to the fix log is that they're being worked on, but the more recent update from PUBG Corp. indicates it won't be long before they're added.

While hardware bans are already one of the more serious ways of restricting players' access to the game, PUBG Corp. also started taking legal measures against the most obstinate cheaters. Back in January, it was reported that PUBG Corp. with the help of Tencent had arrested over 120 PUBG cheat creators, and the newest dev letter said these types of cheating countermeasures will continue.

"For some organizations, bans and countermeasures aren't enough to dissuade the production of these programs," the dev letter said. "In some regions, we have been able to work with local law enforcement to arrest the groups involved in the production and sale of unauthorized programs and we will continue to aid authorities in any way we can."

The full FIX PUBG dev letter can be read here.