PUBG Corporation doesn’t want to completely region lock China away from the rest of the world, they want to continue to foster a “diverse” community of players. However, the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds community wants to have nothing to do with it, and have continued to very aggressively petition to completely region lock China away from American and European players.
PUBG Corporation’s head of service management and anti-cheating division, Dohyung Lee, made a lengthy post on the Steam community threads to explain how they have a dedicated team set out to stop cheating and will be employing new methods to curb the rampant cheating taking place in the game…
“[…] we have established a dedicated team to focus on combating cheat programs and since our launch on early access we have been committed to detecting and preventing such programs. As part of that effort, we have developed a new anti-cheat solution internally. We will be introducing an early version of the solution on our live servers next week (this is the solution that is currently being tested on our test servers). This solution will complement the systems that have been developed and implemented already. Its main focus for now is blocking unauthorized programs but it will be further developed to broaden the scope of its abilities.
“This feature will also block different helper programs that alter the graphics or aid in gameplay in some way. 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.“
The PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds community is having none of it, though.
There are more than 250 pages of players making it known to PUBG Corporation to ban the Chinese from the American and European servers.
The petition to region lock the Chinese to their own servers has reached over 9,000 signatures over on Change.org.
This has been going on since late last year, with American gamers leading the charge to ban and isolate Chinese gamers into their own servers, but it began escalating in January of 2018.
Now on every update for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, gamers make it known to region lock China away from the American and European players because they claim that the Chinese are responsible for all the lagging and cheats in the game and that they can’t speak English. This has resulted in many American gamers claiming they don’t want to play the game with the Chinese.
One gamer offered an alternative, suggesting that if PUBG Corporation one ban the Chinese from American and European servers, they should just isolate the American server away from the rest of the world so only Americans can play with each other in national isolation.
Clinically Retarded wrote…
“Hey bluehole since for some reason you don’t want to region lock China and would rather let your playerbase wither away while these cheaters ruin the game why dont you region lock America? Make it so Americans have to play on the American servers but other contries cant join America. This could cause some problems for people with friends outside of the Americas, but this can be avoided by forcing a squad to play on the server of the host. Other Americans what do you think of a solution like this? Would you like to see this implemented?”
According to Steam Spy, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has nearly 30 million players. Also more than 40% of the owners of the game come from China, making up the largest demographic of PUBG Corporation’s PC player base than any other region.
It makes sense why PUBG Corporation refuses to lock out their largest market demographic from other servers or restrict their server access, but Americans and Europeans are making it absolutely known that they will not stand for playing with Chinese gamers any longer.
With Tencent courting mainland China as the distributor of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in the region, they have stepped up their crackdown on cheaters by arresting cheat tool makers, but that still hasn’t been enough to stop cheaters from flooding the game.
PUBG Corporation may be forced to choose between servicing Americans or prioritizing their efforts to cater toward the Chinese.