One of the biggest announcements from The Game Awards last week was the announcement that PUBG: Battlegrounds will be free-to-play on January 12, 2022. As you would expect from a game as popular as PUBG: Battlegrounds, a plethora of players and new fans will flock to the game to experience the frenzy of the battle royale for free.
In preparation for the flow of new players to the servers, the developers are working on a new anti-cheat system for the game. This new anti-cheat system called ZAKYNTHOS will be an integral part of identifying and blocking accounts found to be cheating. The new system will use a range of countermeasures to combat cheat programs and hopefully make PUBG: Battlegrounds a much better experience.
PUBG: Battlegrounds new anti-cheat system, ZAKYNTHOS
The developers shared four main areas of work that they have been working on in 2021 to improve the system of protection against cheating, namely:
- Anti-cheat improvements
- Hardware Inhibit Improvements
- Game client vulnerabilities
- Reinforcing violations in the game
ZAKYNTHOS
ZAKYNTHOS is a proprietary anti-cheat solution for PUBG: Battlegrounds developers released in January 2021 as a means to speed up the anti-cheat process. Prior to this, the game used slower external solutions. Since January 2021, Zakynthos has been able to remove another 28% of last year’s cheaters, which is a pretty solid number.
Here is a list of what the developers have been working on when it comes to anti-cheat solution:
- Automatic analysis of cheat programs based on machine learning methods
- Round-the-clock monitoring of rating matches in the highest echelons of power
- Kernel Driver Implementation
- Prevention of client falsification
- Improvements to the equipment lock system
The developers shared more information about their current anti-cheat status, and when comparing the number of permanent bans to last year’s figure, the number has decreased by about 47%. This suggests that the number of users of cheat programs in the game has increased significantly.