PUBG dev says it bans up to 100,000 accounts a week, and now it's deploying AI models to hunt the cheats

pcgamer.com:

PUBG developer Krafton has a new blogpost from its anti-cheat team, discussing the omnipresent problem of cheating in the game and what it's doing to tackle the villains. It begins with a pretty astonishing demonstration of the scale of the problem: «Every week, the PUBG: Battlegrounds Anti-Cheat Team identifies and imposes permanent bans on an average of 60,000 to a maximum of about 100,000 accounts involved in the use, distribution, or sale of illegal software.»

Then the question might be why do players still encounter cheaters at all? Krafton says it recognises that «a more comprehensive approach» is needed and that, while it can go on banning accounts permanently till the cows come home, it needs a «fundamental solution» to analyse and track accounts doing the bad things.

Its focus is on accounts that are used for cheating in ranked mode, which it puts in two categories: first is «hijacked accounts» and second are accounts that «exploit the Survival Mastery Level system». The first is fairly self-explanatory, and Krafton says its analysis shows that roughly 85% of permanently banned accounts were created prior to PUBG's transition to a free-to-play model (January 2022). Krafton says this isn't because these accounts have been cheating for ages and only just got detected, but «rather implies that it is highly probable that cheaters obtained other players' accounts and started using illegal software on those acquired accounts.»

It's a pretty straightforward trick. Scammers nick a legit account and sell it to a cheater, who then gets to happily feast on chicken dinners until Krafton bans the account: at which point they just buy another and keep on trucking. 

The Survival Mastery Level element is that newly created