Cheaters, it turns out, ruin everything. If you play PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on PC, you know cheaters have been making mischief for honest players for months now. And no one is more familiar with the cheating problem then the game’s developers. In a new post on the PUBG Steam page, the development team says combating cheaters has delayed updates and other improvements planned for the game—including a third map.
“Early this year,” they wrote, “development of some of the major features and systems was delayed as our focus shifted towards tightening our anti-cheat effort.” That’s a bummer for anyone hoping for improvements, but it’s understandable. What good are new features if you can’t walk two steps without getting sniped by some punk using auto-aiming software?
In fact, players are still waiting to see what the roadmap for this year’s updates and features will be. Developer PUBG Corp. said they’ll reveal the plans for the first half of 2018 sometime in March. “We would like to ask for our players’ generous understanding that despite the team’s eagerness to share what we have been planning and working on, the timing had to be changed.”
We do know about two sizable updates PUBG Corp. is working on. One is the new map, which they announced last year. It’s a large map set on an island in the Adriatic Sea that features forests, snowy mountains, and a cosmodrome. The other update is a new kind of matchmaking that will take the strength of players’ internet connection into account when placing them in matches. That means players with strong connections should see less jerky movement from players with poor connections.
But thanks to cheaters, we may not be seeing those updates for a while. Last year, PUBG Corp. enlisted a company called BattleEye to help with their cheating prevention efforts. BattleEye says it has banned more than 2.5 million players so far. That’s impressive, especially considering many developers would kill to have 2.5 million players play their games at all.