The era of the door-to-door salesman might be over, but purveyors of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds cheats are happy to bring their wares directly to you for a personal demonstration. Which occasionally involves owning the crap out of you.
Players selling PUBG cheats and hacks have popped up in the game itself in recent months, demonstrating their products. For example, here is a speedhacker outrunning somebody’s car in an attempt to sell them a cheat, courtesy of Magpie Kingdom:
According to Magpie Kingdom, the cheater’s pitch translates to “Hi friend, are you in a rush? No problem, you keep driving and hear me out. Do you want this brand new mod that I am using? It is on sale right now. Let me demonstrate. I can go faster than your car!”
Other cheaters have taken to using popular PUBG players’ streams as avenues for advertisement. Here’s Ninja getting obliterated by “Divine Cheats”:
And here’s CyanidePlaysGames telling off a cheater for trying to make a sale during his stream:
“I don’t think you understand what fun is, for one,” Cyanide said in response to the advertiser. “Two, go fuck yourself.”
Cheat sellers aren’t just giving roadside demonstrations of their godlike powers, either. They’ve also taken to putting cheat-selling information in their usernames, with the letters “QUN” pointing to a popular Chinese social media channel and implying that people should message them if they want to buy cheats. Last month, quite a few of these users made it to the top of the game’s leaderboards:
I took a look at the leaderboards today, however, and they seem to be free of accounts advertising cheats.
Now, it should be noted that not everybody with “QUN” in their handle is selling cheats. Some people just like to consolidate their online identities. Seeing “WG,” or “Wai Gua,” in somebody’s name is the real tell, as it’s a Chinese phrase that can be used to refer to external cheat programs. Still, while some players are clamoring for PUBG’s developers to just ban everybody with references to Chinese social media in their handles, that’s obviously not a viable solution, because some people would get unjustly banned as a result.
In a recent news post, the PUBG development team said they’re working on “new tools” and will take “stronger actions” in the fight against cheaters, which many irate players consider to be the game’s biggest problem right now. Already, they’ve banned hundreds of thousands of players for cheating, but the game’s forums, Steam reviews, and subreddit are still full of cheat-related complaints. PUBG’s developers admitted that exiling cheaters from the island is gonna be a process: “Our battle against cheaters will not end overnight.”